Hull CDP (discontinued) vs. Skype (discontinued)

Hull is definitely the leading CDP for the small to mid-sized business in which the marketing team wants or needs to have a fair amount of autonomy from engineering, or when it's unrealistic or cost-prohibitive to use internal engineering resources to maintain the marketing database. It's also a great choice for companies who are trying to bring newer and smaller best-of-breed elements into place in their marketing--enabling you to sync customer data records to CTAs/ Chat scenarios/ Email Service Providers, or any type of 3rd party campaign tools. It's probably not the best fit for companies trying to stay in a larger Marketing Cloud Ecosystem, e.g. Adobe/ Oracle.

Incentivized

Having interacted with a new replacement tool, Microsoft Teams, it is challenging to recommend Skype, as it lacks some essential features, such as being less equipped with the latest updates, and it is not platform-independent, causing issues on PCs and phones, as well as during calls that might hinder work.

Incentivized

• Slack integration - we revolve around slack as our central comm hub and having our customer information surfaceable is just gold.
• Making back-end data easy to read and digest - there is a lot of data that gets generated by our customers and it's impossible to sift through without Hull consolidating that information for us.
• Customer support - we have only had a couple issues in the many months using Hull and it's always been a quick resolution. They use Slack to support BTW which I love.

Incentivized

• The instant chat function is great. Very straightforward, easy to use, easy to learn, no technical issues.
• Video calls are pretty easy also, user friendly and a mostly stable connection with no issues.
• Voice calls are easy also, eliminates the need for an external landline or the need to use your cell phone. Clear connections, not really any dropped calls.

Incentivized

• Needs a deduplication engine
• Needs to be able to perform bulk and automated data cleansing (unified data is messy)
• Needs to integrate with more tools
• Needs to be able to be tailored to different use cases, such as a retail/ecommerce use case, with RFM metrics

Incentivized

• Skype is a RESOURCE hog. People who have limited bandwidth will have poor call quality.
• It is hard to figure out how to use emojis and upload images in the chat.
• The background images do not fool anybody....it is clearly not your real background.

Incentivized

I have given this rating as this need to give more than that as it's very helpful for us and makes our work more efficient and fast.

Skype is not as good as Facetime in terms of ease to glance at it and figure out how it works. I think that's a result of Skype trying to be too many things at once. A lot of the menu and UI could be streamlined, and I would jettison some of the additional functions that have been tacked on over the years to simplify. That being said, while some options are slightly hard to find, they all work flawlessly once found.

Incentivized

I am not aware of the current support level for Skype for business, as I have never used even though I have the product. However, the support for Skype's personal paid users is not where it could be. Users who pay for Skype features do not have a clear path to reach out to support. So, rating 6, can be better as soon as I need to use Skype for business support and get a good experience. I will say that I will renew Skype for Business subscription, which is a significant inconsistency on my end. The explanation is that Skype for Business comes bundled with Office for Business, with no additional cost, so why not.

Incentivized

It can be used on the phone via mobile application as well as on the desktop by logging in to the website. Easily installed and ready to use.

Incentivized

We had initially identified Segment as a solution due to the number of integrations they supported. The problem is that with Segment we would have still had to build and maintain a database along with query tools. Overall Hull emerged as a better starting point for us

Incentivized

We use Skype in combination with Grasshopper. While Grasshopper acts as a routing toll free number with extensions, if we are making calls directly, we do it through Skype. Skype's desktop and mobile apps are easier to use, and provide unlimited local calls at a flat, affordable rate. Allowing our team to use their existing mobile or desktop devices without additional hardware for business office phone calls is important, and Skype makes that possible

Incentivized

The service provided is up to date, as discussed before buying.

• Positive: No longer asking engineering for customer activity data
• Positive: Allowing additional data integrations for where our customer activity data can be seen

Incentivized

• Skype made keeping in touch with an advisor in Mexico very easy. The initiative there resulted in 5 new partnerships.
• Skype has helped me with account management for at least 3 customers in LATAM--usually it's a fast way to answer a question about a support renewal.
• For about 9 months Skype helped me stay in touch with a colleague in Prague. We would meet once a week to go over sales activities.

Incentivized