OutboundEngine vs. Talon.One

OutboundEngine does a referral campaign and I've been able to close a couple of deals based on getting in touch with people who engage with this campaign and state they could use my services in the next 6 months. This is a great follow up tool for those you may or may not know are going to be needing your services.

Incentivized

I see Talon.One as best suited for small or medium sized businesses - less than 50k customers. The reason being, I do not see the scalability of the tool; it is the classic what-you-see-is-what-you-get. On the positive, because you get all of it out of the box, it makes it very simple to have one or two people dedicated to administration and development. Additionally, Talon.One won't be contacting you for more money just to use a feature

Incentivized

• The content that they generate to send to our clients is relevant and the clients want to engage with us. It makes us appear more professional and consistent, even though we are a smaller company.
• It helps us stay in touch with clients and helps us stay top of mind. We are able to generate more new business leads if we are in consistent contact with current, former, and potential clients.
• Their customer service and support is outstanding. All my questions were answered and I went into the program feeling confident and knowledgeable.

• The interface is great. Very clean and easy to use.
• Their support team is top notch!
• The speed at which you can test a code after creation is unrivaled.

Incentivized

• I do not like the use of drawings to attract new customers, and they have ignored my requests to eliminate that for my personal emails.
• I do not like it when a competitor in my immediate market has the same posts. It cheapens the service or makes it appear that I am simply sharing another's post.

Incentivized

• Learning the vocabulary of the tool was the most challenging for me.
• There are some things that take too many clicks, like user administration.
• It isn't obvious where the help tools are located, especially when struggling with the code logic.

Incentivized

The biggest issue is poor ROI. The second biggest issue is rigid customer service process, lack of a sense of urgency, and inability to reach out to upper management with issues.

Overall, OutboundEngine is very user friendly. It is simple to set up and explore, and if there are any issues or questions, the customer service team and account managers are always available to help. They are very knowledgeable and were able to explain everything in detail to me. The program is easy to navigate and helps me stay organized, and an uncomplicated and straightforward solution was exactly what I was looking for

I haven't had to contact Outbound Engine because I haven't had any application errors or unplanned outages. I basically have had such a trouble free experience with them that I haven't had to call. Everything is automated and I get a notice to review every isse. I suppose if I personalized the newsletter a bit more and added some of my own articles, I would need to contact them, (which I should really start to do) but so far things have been so on point, I haven't felt the need.

Incentivized

The customer service was excellent! Everyone I spoke to was kind and knowledgeable. My account manager was easily reachable. Setup of the OutboundEngine program was explained really thoroughly, and we knew how we could best use the product to meet the needs of our clients and get our online and social media presence off the ground.

I selected it for the ability to have an automated system do 3 things all at once, social media posts, emails and the instant communication with the chat box. I have never seen a chat come through that lead to a helpful client touchpoint. I have never used another product but have since begun to weigh some of the less expensive options.

Incentivized

For clarity, I am only comparing the discount code feature from Salesforce vs. the entire platform. In Salesforce, creating a code was an arduous process, then we had to wait for the sync job to run with our web services engine (every 10 minutes) to see if what we had created was functioning correctly. Do the math: If configuration takes 10 minutes, you have to wait a total of 20 minutes to test it, then if it doesn't work, try again in 15-20 minutes. Over an 8-hour day, you aren't accomplishing anything! TalonOne made it so simple. 10-15 minutes of configuration time, then near immediate testing time. We were able to create and troubleshoot a discount code in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days

Incentivized

• One client identified how one article I sent that he read saved him from having to replace his entire AC system.
• One client actually thought I was sending this to him personally because I valued him
• One of the above transacted with me twice for over $3M in sales

Incentivized

• TalonOne's capabilities and administration tools made it incredibly easy to setup, saving us days in testing with our previous tool.
• The detailed logging features helped us drill down to the exact step in the process that was failing.
• The reporting features helped us track customer usage and engagement across all of our markets.

Incentivized