Kustomer vs. kvCORE

I would say the greatest strength of Kustomer is its flexibility. In the hands of a skilled admin, it can be adapted to tons and tons of different use cases. I've been able to make custom displays for different groups of agents, produce complex cross sections of users, draw interesting data relationships combining marketing contacts and customer-initiated contacts. For example, there's really no other data source in our company which could tell you which users received a specific promo code and checked out with it, received their delivery within 14 days and then can related that to the number of times they contacted us about using our product. At the intersection of communication, marketing, data, and relationship-management, Kustomer shines at the center. I would say it falls short when you are trying to coordinate multiple "side conversations" with multiple sources to resolve an issue. This is a tough task for any type of platform, but if you're maintaining 3 different email chains with a 3PL partner, the customer, and a separate internal conversation, it would be confusing anyway!

Incentivized

I think if you have a very large brokerage and can afford to pay for a fully customized set up then it may be worthwhile. I would make sure you have a dedicated support team, not an account manager. In my opinion, the account managers are worthless and will not respond most of the time. We are on our second account manager in 9 months of using the system and cannot get in touch with him. In my experience, the account managers have no knowledge of how the system works or how anyone in real estate would want it to work. Obviously, I can only say this for the two managers we have had so far. I would steer clear of this system unless you want to spend a few thousand a month for a system that, I feel, will impede your business rather than improve it.

• All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
• The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
• We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.

Incentivized

• Not one thing!
• It sends unwanted canned responses to potential clients that you haven't approved. You must figure out how to use it to make them stop. This was day 1.
• If you like to learn using many many different videos to learn a product, then this maybe for you.

• For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
• Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
• Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
• I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.

Incentivized

• Their support is good, but wait times can be long. They want you to use their chat, but then when you ask your question, it can be a several hour wait time between responses. The people are nice and resolve your issue. But I think chat is for quick back and forth communication, not something with a long delay. Also, you can only really do it effectively on your computer, not on your phone.
• It's proving very tough to track leads from campaigns we are running ourselves. If your website converts a lead, it really just gives you the website source, and even that only some of the time. It would be great to create custom sources and have kvCORE track that traffic and lead via some sort of UTM tag or URL parameter.
• Some of the load times aren't great. When I load up my database, it takes a while to actually display. Also, when a lead is claimed in a pond, you have to refresh to be able to contact them. Then once you add a campaign, you have to refresh again to see the tasks that fire. This is a bit clunky.
• The app is great, but there is still some limited functionality. It would be great to access and claim leads from a pond on the mobile app. Also if you could get push notifications when new leads are added. Our time to lead sucks, and that's because kvCORE doesn't alert you super quickly.

Incentivized

Because there's no other tool like Kustomer

Incentivized

There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.

Incentivized

It doesn't deserve a zero because you can access contacts and get reminders to contact them. In my experience, you can not use the system for proper communication with both prospects and their spouses.

Because Kustomer is available when you need it

Incentivized

Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity

Incentivized

I did not reach out to Kustomer support when we had an issue. Still, whenever we provide feedback to our manager regarding what can improve based on our experience using Kustomer, our manager always comments that Kustomer support always replies with some positive feedback based on our suggestions.

Incentivized

I love kvCORE's support. Having the little chat feature in the bottom right of my screen the whole time I'm working takes away any stress or worry about using it. When I first started using it, I learned its features by clicking and trying things, and more than once I had to go into the chat support and ask how to undo or fix what I had done. I don't think I've ever waited more than 5 minutes to get a reply back and it being almost instant and right there on my screen allowed me to continue working and know immediately when my question had been answered.

Incentivized

Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable

Incentivized

It was very easy to understand.

Incentivized

Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.

Incentivized

Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able to be more conversational and informal, while still solving their issues quickly. It also helps us build relationships with customers and increases repeat orders.

Incentivized

Konversion and BoomTown are the only two I have used. Both have their things to recommend. Since I used Konversion, using kvCORE was simpler and I was able to upload my contacts seamlessly. This made adopting a new system easier and less likely to have a gap in contacting customers.

Incentivized

Because customer is flexible and scalable

Incentivized

• We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
• Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.

Incentivized

• Because I am an EXP agent, I receive kvCore for $50/month so I have a $1550/month positive over any non-EXP agent.
• Great new lead follow up with automatic and realistic contact for a higher conversion rate that I couldn't do by myself.

Incentivized