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.
N/A
Verint Channel Automation
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Verint Channel Automation is a social customer service software that enables companies to engage in large volumes of social media conversations with their customers. The cloud-based software combines intelligent prioritization with team management workflows.
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.
From experience, you may ask the Conversocial team to make recommendations on licenses for larger vs. smaller social customer service teams. The need for support and the amount of usage you may get from the tool's robust offering may differ as a result of those precedents. The tool is adaptable in both scenarios it would seem.
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.
Previous conversations: This is one of the main reasons why I personally love Conversocial over Hootsuite and other social media engagement tools. Conversocial pulls in all previous interactions we've had with community members and it helps us identify if we've already addressed their problem, if they are a detractor/advocate, and so much more. With other engagement tools, it's frustrating as a community member may repost the same thing over and over again, but at different time periods. If you're unable to see what someone has said in the past, we may waste our time replying to the same thing multiple times, or we also risk responding with the same general advice, when we could try a different approach.
Tags and filters: Conversocials use of tags and filters are extremely simple to use. They have shortcuts which help you easily assign a tag to an item and then you can easily pull up each of those tags within Conversocial itself or your can open up an external report. If my team is in a hurry and wants to quickly see a certain tag, we can use the filter option and within seconds we have all the information we need.
Simple shortcuts: Conversocial has several shortcuts that save my team a lot of time. One single button on my keyboard can apply sentiment and archive something so it's out of my way. I can also use shortcuts to apply a tag, assign an item, and do other tasks. It may seem like a small benefit but each second saved really adds up throughout each day and week.
Communication: As we know, technology has issues and every tech issue Conversocial has experiences has been handled extremely well. I've never encountered any issues contacting Conversocial, we're always notified when they are working on a solution and once the problem has been fixed. We also receive random pop-ups within Conversocial to notify us of known issues before our team experiences them, and when there is a new feature that we should be aware of. Their communication is always on point and it's great to know that we can always rely on them.
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.
I would like to see an improvement in the reporting dashboard which is something I mentioned to Josh (the CEO) on a call back in April. He said that it is something they are working on but to remember that this is truly a customer service social media platform so some of the features that I would like to see may not fit well with the users of the product.
The only two reasons we would not continue using Conversocial are it's lack of comprehensive analytics and its lack of Radian6's categorization tools. Tags make up for the categorization pretty well, however, and we're considering switching everything over to this now that we've tested tags for a couple months within Conversocial. (I previously wrote that Conversocial lacks support for some social channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but they have now added Instagram and YouTube.)
Because of the number of features it offers and the manner in which they're presented. I've explored a number of other tools that just don't do it as well. When sorting through and responding to hundreds of social media messages each day, the number of clicks it takes to do something really matters. Conversocial does a great job of minimizing clicks and presenting the data we need without having to click to find it
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.
Our account rep at Conversocial has set up a call with me every two weeks to check in, talk about new features, or answer questions. I know I can email or call her for help anytime. Their support team also responds quickly.
Comprehensive training in all aspects of the software and general usages (including social media) for both agents and managers. Simulation workshops really made the live deployment process very smooth.
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
Early on we did comparisons with Hootsuite and later with Adobe. While they have similarities, the difference at the time and likely currently, was the personal interest and general accessibility of Conversocial's platform and people. The combination of an effective CRM solution and a team that was readily available to help proved to be the winning formula for our business.
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.
One of the biggest benefits we are seeing is that we have reduced the number of post-holiday complaints coming into head office. Since we are responding to issues and concerns as they arise, we can impact overall customer satisfaction.
The efficiencies gained from using a centralized platform for managing the response process has enabled us to reduce our team by 50%.
We can track that we are responding to a fan's first message within 30 minutes.
We can track the number of messages each user engages with.
We can see the most effective times of day to post and reply.
