Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite (discontinued) vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

If you need a hosted rather than cloud based CRM, Siebel is a consideration. It's best suited to organizations with a large customer database. Given the complexity involved you need at least two full time marketing analysts.The email marketing functionality isn't core to the offering and most organizations would be much better served by cloud based email systems. Siebel offers a very comprehensive feature set and is powerful in the hands of a super user. However, given the costs involved in upgrading a hosted solution I would put serious effort into convincing your decision makers to go for a cloud based CRM instead.

Incentivized

Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential

Incentivized

• Siebel EMS offered useful customer insight and more effective dialogue with recipients by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time.
• Siebel EMS was very effective for loyalty lifecycle and retention by seamlessly integrating with marketing and CRM platforms.
• Siebel EMS was instrumental in aligning marketing, sales and analytics divisions.

Incentivized

• The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
• The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
• Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).

• Oracle Siebel Marketing Suite's processing time is not as fast as I would expect it to be. This is the major improvement I would like to see in it.
• It requires a very high level of training being given to the employees for configuring and implementing it in the business needs.
• Expert employees are needed in order to understand the functionality of Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite, which is not easy to find.

Incentivized

• In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
• Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
• The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.

Incentivized

A very conservative data security policy limits the organization to a hosted solution. At particular issue is the tendency of cloud based CRMs to have data centres based in the US, a major issue for Canadian consumers. Once you have integrated a system of this size and complexity, and have the staff resources to utilize it effectively, it's hard to justify a move to an alternative. Consider Siebel if you are a conservatively run organization with a large database of customers and a big marketing team

Incentivized

Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.

The system meets all my expectations.

Incentivized

Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.

Incentivized

Salesforce is easier to use and more open source and available for external integrations.

Incentivized

Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.

Incentivized

• It has increased the business tactics as we have added more clients who wish to use this technology.

Incentivized

• Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
• The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
• Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
• Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.

Incentivized