Iterable is an AI-powered customer communication platform that activates customers across channels in real-time. With intelligent personalization, dynamic content, and a cross-channel suite, Iterable helps brands create seamless, data-driven experiences across email, SMS, push, and in-app notifications.
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SwagUp
Score 7.0 out of 10
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SwagUp in Piscataway aims to bring simplicity and quality to the world of branded swag. The solution provides swag packs for employee welcoming, client gifting, and event attendees. The service is paired with warehousing and fulfillment services.
At OneVision, I was brought on to migrate from ActiveCampaign and it was a huge improvement to go to Iterable. Much of the improvement lay in the back end connectivity to databases, which although not directly in my purview, made it easier to work as a team (product & marketing) inside our company.
In my experience, it was a horribly complicated process with an account manager, who takes things very personally in my opinion. SwagUp came highly recommended from some client-serving companies, who I believe, apparently, spend a lot of money with them. For a company that is supposed to help other companies wow their clients, I find their customer service is woefully lacking in my opinion. I believe “swag” doesn’t make up for the bad service. Not recommended because I believe I did not get the customer service or product fulfillment I expected when initially choosing this product, service, and company.
Customer Journey creation - the platform easily creates a visual path for the marketing team to curate messaging based around timing, channel, behavior as well as add split testing logic and exit criteria so we target only the audiences we want.
Customer Success - one of the best teams I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I'm able to move so much quicker because they really create a helpful partnership.
Audience segmentation, the platform is easy to work with even if you're a first time user, they do a great job of visually showing the logic and the and/or/none type rules.
Insights. I think this is the biggest downfall of Iterable, the insights and analytics area is really not good at all. We have almost stopped using it all together in favour of just using Mixpanel (but now we're paying for 2 platforms). Things we can do in Mixpanel that we can't do in Iterable:
- custom conversion windows
- more scalable reports
- comparing multiple events
- setting up alerts that trigger to slack
Segmentation - building segments and organizing lists that are already built.
- relative dates can be confusing but are a critical piece of building lists
- unable to compare multiple events
- we have a pretty good naming structure for our lists but with so many daily users, no good way to organize them (with labels or folders) and searching for a list requires you to find the exact word we end up re creating dynamic lists each time
- static lists don't show you what rules were used to create the list
- no way to see changes over time
Improved ways of collaborating. There's no way of knowing if other people are editing a list, template, campaign or journey. easy to overwrite each other's work
I've been an Iterable user for about 4 years, at 2 different companies. SinceI started using Iterable I think the number of bugs has increased.
I wish Iterable did a better job testing releases so we're not the ones discovering issues so frequently.
In app message. We've had issues with this tool/channel starting at implementation. It feels like it never made it's way out of beta, despite us paying for it now.
The app team offered to do working sessions with us to understand how we use it day to day and never followed up on that. There have been no improvements to the tool and any time we run into another issue with it (although Jena in support is great) it takes forever to diagnose or we are told the issue cannot be replicated. It just feels like we have constant issues with this tool.
We've actually onboarded to another tool (not ideal for omni channel) for some in app messages because this one has so many downfalls and is so buggy.
Self serve documentation is great when you have an idea of what you're doing but not entirely sure. It is not easy to understand for people who are newer or less well versed in the platform.
Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.
The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.
I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.
We have an active order in with SwagUp at this moment for $1400+, but the poor customer service, complicated process, the entitled attitude of their account manager who is on some sort of weird power trip, and the fact that our clients won't ever be receiving what we ordered makes that amount irrelevant in my opinion and experience. I feel like the time I wasted with their account manager was worth much more than what we spent with SwagUp. First of all, I’m not the type to be critical of anyone doing their job. People are busy, tech has issues, emails get lost, etc. in our digital world. It happens and true professionals who work online understand that. Unfortunately, in my opinion, there are employees who don’t get this and feel entitled to express their emotions freely. I believe that while this doesn’t harm them, it definitely harms the bottom line of the company. In my opinion, an angry and insulted client WILL spread the word about said company - which is precisely what I will do. Let's talk about this what I feel like is a completely unprofessional account manager first, because, in my opinion, this is the type of employee who causes companies to bleed revenue unless they are checked. The call was recorded, so whoever is in charge can feel free to review it for consistency. The purpose of my call was simple - to smooth out what I believe was a simple miscommunication. In my opinion, what should have been a simple process became stalled because the person who I feel like was an entitled account manager was more concerned with flexing his “client boundary” muscles than actually doing his job, which was taking care of the account. I believe that an account manager who gets upset and emotional because he didn’t receive a response to an email, and who can’t even disguise that fact on a zoom call, needs to fix it or work elsewhere. Because if he had this attitude with me, I feel like lord knows how many others of his accounts are receiving the same treatment. During my experience, here are a few statements I believe he made on the call: -I believe he talked about how my business was “not the type of clients SwagUp wants to work with”… -I believe he complained out how it was “unfair” it was to bring up their January 18th delay. -I believe he asked, “what sort of company we run” (because an email was missed - even though from my understanding from SwagUp, communication is encouraged mainly through their portal). -I believe he proceeded to talk about “how busy” he was and had other people to talk to, while he was on the call with me, a paying client. -I believe he also complained about third-party vendors and stated that they (SwagUp) don’t even want to have third-party materials sent to them (which to me, is confusing as a customer, because then why on earth do you even allow it through your product and service?) -I believe he denied that the company had anything to do with “fulfillment” and then proceeded to try to explain what sort of company SwagUp was. Nevermind that when our order was delayed the email literally started with (what I believe is a copy and pasted message) “You are receiving this message because we've been notified that your order is experiencing a longer than normal fulfillment timeline.” -During my experience, after what I feel like was him constantly implying that our company was incompetent because we missed an email, he proceeded to give what I felt like was a half-hearted “apology” and state that “he hopes we consider SwagUp in the future”. After all of this happened during my experience with them, I informed him that we would not based on what I felt like was his horrible customer service to me, and guess what Mr. Emotional Customer Service does? I believe he ended the call by saying, “Well, the feeling is mutual”. With all of that personal customer service experience I had out of the way, here’s the context of our experience using SwagUp: We began the process with SwagUp on November 29th. Mockups were completed and approved on December 28th. In the meantime, we had originally wanted to add a third-party item to our order, so they linked us up with an account executive. Throughout the process, the account executive was adamant that we use the SwagUp dashboard to stay informed of the progress of our materials and order. In my opinion, based on my experience there with the account executive, the implication was that everything could be one on there (SwagUp dashboard). The problem, in my opinion, is (and now I know) that it can’t. On January 18th, our order was delayed. The message I believe we received was: “We know you and your recipients are looking forward to receiving your custom swag and understand the frustration of missing holiday expectations. We appreciate your patience, apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to getting you your order as soon as possible.” No complaints on our part for that. On the 20th, our account manager reached out to ask about the third-party material we requested to be included. Unfortunately, on our part, due to a personnel change, the email thread was archived. Nevertheless, we were informed it was shipped to their warehouse. However, at this time on their online portal (SwagUp dashboard), where we were previously constantly encouraged to check for updates, there was nothing to see in my opinion. I couldn't find any new updates or any new information. As far as we knew at that point, our order was still delayed. Bear in mind that at this point in our experience, we had paid our invoice and were assuming that SwagUp still had logistics problems due to COVID and other factors mentioned in their email. On February 16th, I believe the account manager emailed to state that due to lack of responsiveness, they were going to go ahead and pack the packages without the third-party material we had requested. I believe we did not hear back from SwagUp till February 21st when were informed that our order was ready to ship. This is when my customer service experience began, which was when the account manager was called and I believe his entire attitude was based around being upset that his emails were not responded to. In my experience, he kept repeating that under no circumstances would they place our requested material in the boxes - never mind that I didn’t even call about that. I never asked, but during our call, it seemed like to me that he got some sort of kick out of explaining how their process worked and why he would send the boxes back, which was information that I had no interest in hearing because I didn’t call about any of that. It seemed to me that he wasn't informed that SwagUp had delayed the process and that we received no feedback from their portal, which I feel like they heavily push. The craziest part, in my opinion, was that at the end of everything, he STILL redirected us to the portal to fill out everything else. I recommend SwagUp to listen up. This company (SwagUp) *looks* good as a brand. I understand that logistics is tough. This could have been a good experience - even just using your portal, but, in my opinion, there are two issues: 1) Your third-party fulfillment is clunky and 2) Your account managers (the human element) need to be better managed and trained based on my experience. Just because they had a poor experience with one client, I hope they don't treat all other clients with the disdain and disrespect that I feel like I experienced during my time using SwagUp. In my experience, we still paid for our product on time and fulfilled every aspect of the complicated process, despite a delay, which we never complained about. Even though we requested it, our third-party order will not even be included when it's shipped out to our clients – and we still had no complaints either. But, in my opinion, what we won’t put up with or will actively share is an employee that I believe is emotional, condescending, and acts like he owns the company towards clients.
I admittedly don't remember much of Klaviyo, as I have become so familiar with Iterable. I definitely prefer Iterable, however. There are so many more features in Iterable and it just feels like a more dynamic and comprehensive experience with more granular data than Klaviyo presented us
SwagUp has more options to order swag and items for the organization and is more user-friendly, the others are but SwagUp is easier to figure out on the first try!
We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.
Negative- The process takes too long, comes with delays, and based on my experience, involved a lot of miscommunication.
Negative- In my experience, I believe the account manager was rude and entitled.
Negative- In my opinion, employees may say one thing, but their automated portal proceeds at a different rate, so I feel like there is constantly conflicting information for the customer.
