Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) vs. Sprinklr Service vs. Vonage Communications APIs

Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs

Incentivized

Sprinklr Service has always been well-suited for all of the work we do. As it's all social media content, and most require responses or escalations, Sprinklr Service covers all of that. The only time I think we wouldn't need it is if we were working with a much smaller client who didn't need us to have eyes on so many platforms at once.

Incentivized

While there are likely a variety of scenarios that would work well with Vonage [Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo)], implementations that need transactional message and response actions are a great fit. Our experience with transactional messaging has been really good and we are continuing to look at opportunities to expand our usage of this part of their service.

• Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
• Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
• Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.

Incentivized

• Automated routing to appropriate teams
• Automated notifications for certain types of content or posts from certain users
• The reporting options are fantastic.
• We've integrated a chatbot seamlessly with Sprinklr modern care so our team members can pick up a conversation if our bot isn't able to provide an answer.

Incentivized

• I like the delivery speed, it's very instantaneous. As soon as the delivery status changes on the website, the message gets delivered. The rates are also cheap and affordable.
• The accuracy of the services and the non-stop supportive team.
• Simple API, easy to integrate with existing notification functionality in your Laravel apps.
• Ease of implementation. We needed less than one month to go live.

Incentivized

• The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
• Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
• No free tier.

Incentivized

• I find it difficult to dive into analytics for each social post. The reporting tool gives me an overview of the channels but I would love to look at a breakdown of each post performance.
• You currently can't add closed caption subtitles to videos uploaded through Sprinklr so this results in having to revert to the native platform.
• I would love to be able to set up a newsfeed that includes posts from a number of our partner accounts, so I can keep up to date with what they're posting.

Incentivized

• Written documentation and discovery could be a lot better.

The biggest reason we renewed, and kept up with Sprinklr Modern Care is because it is an active community and there is customer buy-in already. They continue to update and improve the product, but more importantly, the customers are using it. It's easy to switch products when it's not an active component in your daily structure, but switching and migrating the data or providing alternatives becomes difficult when customers have grown accustomed to a specific experience. As long as they continue to improve the available features and the community stays active, renewed use will continue.

Incentivized

It did the job for us and we were happy with the delivery rates of the email, analytics and customisation available while integrating it within our platform.

Incentivized

I've spent year designing products so I'm a tough judge when it comes to other solutions. It's clear that Sprinklr Modern Care was designed for the average online consumer with a very user friendly interface. They have made improvements to the admin tools to make that area of the product easier to use as well.

The overall usability of Vonage [Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo)] system for message delivery is sufficient for our implementation. Some improvements and additional reporting options in the account administration interface would increase our utilization of the post-delivery data further in order to provide further value-added features for our clients.

No issues with system availability. They manage updates in off-peak hours and I usually don't notice the changes until I log into the system the next day.

Performance is great and is not negatively effecting our processes. We have to make sure it doesn't effect out load times. Not currently seeing any issues with widgets affecting page load times.

I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.

Incentivized

I know the Sprinklr conference calls have been helpful, but sometimes submitting a ticket can be a little daunting. In the past, we've included information in screenshots that are then asked for by a member of the support staff. The turnaround time has been between 3 days, which isn't horrible.

Incentivized

The product feels a bit like a black box since it's built to be an off-the-shelf solution so sometimes it feels like the only way to really understand it is to talk to an engineer directly as the documentation is so-so.

Our customer support team went through in-person training. I am not unable to rate.

Basic setup took me less than 30 minutes. This includes initial configuration, putting in the initial content, and getting the look-and-feel customized. The domain routing took the normal lag time any other website or blogging service. The really important thing was to get the user accounts setup and begin seeding the system with content before a public launch.

So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough

Incentivized

First, we had a social studio which was good in terms of functionalities but slow. After that, we had the chance to use Talkwalker & social bakers which were good tools yet not enough compares to Sprinklr

Incentivized

Nexmo is the best platform in the industry for sure. We don't use all the features that the API provides but we are really satisfied with the ones we use. We are sure this is the best solution in the market if you need to solve the communication in real time with your customers. When we have to build a new website we are going to support the solution with Nexmo.

Incentivized

• It helped us to grow our customer database substantially in the last quarter.
• Last week we reached 62% customer engagement in our campaign. This is very good customer engagement for our projects.
• In the last quarter we achieved our target by 135%.

Incentivized

• Increased employee efficiency: Having a clear, one-stop "shop" where users can leave feedback, ask questions, and find bug fixes or workarounds has saved me (and other community managers at my company) loads of time that was once spent responding to numerous emails on an individual basis.
• Better customer service: Since everyone in the company is alerted of what's being written on our forum, it's easy to spot a high-priority issue, delegate to the person in charge, resolve it, and respond as soon as possible.

Incentivized

• Allowed us to go to market faster (positive).
• Greatly limits our claim to quality as the ceiling on video quality is lower than other platforms (negative).