Planhat, headquartered in Stockholm, offers their modular suite of applications to subscription based businesses, providing customer success product usage health alerts and guidance, as well as revenue management for tracking subscriptions and business health.
N/A
Twilio Segment
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
Planhat is very cost-effective compared to its competitors and offers a similar level of functionality. So if you are looking for a CS platform that will give your CSM's all the data they need to manage their portfolio, then Planhat will do the job very well. I was part of the team that was tasked with selecting a CS platform for Pexip, and the combination of cost and performance made Planhat a clear winner against the other two products we were evaluating.
I still use Salesforce on a daily basis because that's the platform we use to generate quotes. It would be nice if I only had one platform to perform all of my CS tasks in. I'm not sure if that's a criticism of Planhat or not, as I don't know if it has a quoting module that we haven't implemented, or whether that function simply isn't available.
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
Excellent customer support and onboarding experience. They are very quick to respond to queries via the live chat. Our CS manager was brilliant in helping us get set up and making sure we were getting the most from all the features.
The platform and features are very user friendly and intuitive. It's an extremely powerful tool with a lot of functionality, but thankfully it doesn't take long to learn how to use it.
The customer portal is a game changer. The ability to share playbooks, data, and meeting notes all in one place is so useful for our customers and helps build trust and transparency.
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
Allow for cc'ing of AEs or others within the same organization from the messaging center. When I went to send a message from within Planhat, I had to manually type out the AE's email address every time if I wanted them cc'd.
The fonts were funky if I went to add text into an existing email template. For example, if I added in an extra sentence or paragraph, in Outlook on the recipient's end, the font was different despite looking the same within Planhat. Gmail was all consistent, Outlook was showing a different font.
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
Our onboarding experience with Planhat was smooth and quick. The features and dashboards are very intuitive and don't take long to get the hang of. The support team is very responsive and helpful. Our CSM really took time to understand the goals and objectives of our business and helped us make sure Planhat was working to deliver on these goals.
Planhat support is excellent. We have a dedicated resource allocated to work with us, and he is extremely knowledgeable, articulate and responsive. The wider support team at Planhat is also very good, responding quickly to any issues logged. As an end-user, you can chat with Planhat support if you encounter any issues or have any questions, and they have always helped me.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
I was not the person involved in choosing Planhat, but it seems to me that Planhat is much better suited to an account management style role, whereas Hubspot is closer to a sales CRM instead. In my position, Planhat is better suited as it is more graphical, more flexible, and easier to find information on.
I'm not sure these are "official competitors" (or alternatives) to Segment, but we use them in parallel for different goals. We use Datadog for logging and monitoring and we use Mixpanel to perform data analysis based on the data we gather using Segment (and other sources). I don't think we ever evaluated any other service vs. Segment. I think we got a recommendation on Segment, liked it and decided to use it (and we're happy with it since).
Planhat has, for the first time, given us a 360-degree view of all our customers and access to all the different types of communication we have with them across different departments and functions.
The ability to automate workflows, tasks, and assign playbooks to the various phases of our customer lifecycle has aligned all our departments.
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
