Medallia Agent Connect vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The survey sent is customer-friendly, vibrant, simple, and easy to understand. The survey itself is comprised of simple question(s) with straightforward answer options for customers to make their selections. Creating the survey is a straightforward process for us to prepare and implement. Making updates or changes is just as easy.

I think the product, by definition, is meant for marketing — and we use it exactly for that, for running campaigns. That’s the best-suited use case for the product. I don’t think it’s really meant to be used for anything else — that’s just not how it’s designed.

Incentivized

• The fundamental tool for customer satisfaction is exactly right. The way they allow us as agents to share details about ourselves, and humanize the process, has made a huge impact on the customer experience we provide. Our customers feel more inclined to leave us feedback and it allows us to get a real understanding of each of their individual expectations.
• Customer Journey. From the beginning through the Sales process, through procurement, through trial and through now being users for over a year, the Stella Connect team has been incredibly helpful, informative and has provided us with the exact amount of interaction we need. They are very good at respecting your time while making sure they get in touch when necessary. New features that are relevant to our use case are sent my way. It's one of the only product update emails I actually read. They're incredibly responsive and very helpful.

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• Ability to create and send out different surveys triggered by different customer touchpoints
• Ability to create surveys that aren't focused solely on agent performance
• Ability to break down and search the data based on different customer attributes, such as profession or state

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

Incentivized

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

They are the absolute best. My Sales guy Corey D. and my CSM Tim P. are totally a part of the team. They have been incredibly helpful through the process pre and post-sales and have become good friends. I appreciate that I feel like our team's success is always at the forefront of their minds.

Incentivized

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

We do not currently use any other products like Stella Connect, by Medallia. We have recently begun evaluating platforms that would allow us to collect feedback at different touchpoints throughout our customers' journeys, as well as through additional channels such as during our application process, quote and purchase experience, website experience, etc. We have looked at companies such as Survey Monkey, Medallia, and Qualtrics to help us better understand CSAT.

We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.

Incentivized

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

Incentivized

• Implementing Stella Connect was such an easy decision. Before, we were working with "yes, I'm satisfied" or "no, I'm not satisfied" and felt it was an incredibly unclear and polarizing experience, as our users were forced to pick one or the other. Most often, we'd get a negative rating with a comment saying that the experience was fine, but some feature in the product was missing. This left it very difficult for us to really gauge the experience we were providing and how to improve. In addition, agent motivation was incredibly low and impossible to improve because they were left feeling like their scores were not matching their experience. Needless to say, implementing Stella Connect improved all of these issues 10-fold. The ROI has been incredibly substantial. We've been able to improve CSAT scores and properly measure the rate of first attempt resolutions. Team morale is at an all-time high, and our customers even love the experience.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized