Reflektion is a customer centric personalization platform that optimizes customer experiences on an individual basis in real time.
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Companies use Interaction Studio to tailor interactions with customers and prospects to increase loyalty, engagement, and conversions. Using real-time cross-channel personalization and machine learning capabilities, Interaction Studio adds to Marketing Cloud’s robust customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement platform.
Reflektion is very well suited for ecommerce sites that are looking to provide their customers meaningful product recommendations tailored to their specific user experience on our site. We are also beginning to use Reflektion for search results. If you find that your customer base uses your search bar or is having issues with their search experience, Reflektion offers a great auto complete search results feature. We have a sister site that only offers a small catalog of products and we do no use the auto search results feature on this site. If your company has a small catalog the search results tool may not be as effective. I cannot think of a scenario in which an ecommerce site would not find it helpful to provide customized product recommendations to their customers.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is particularly well suited for automated marketing that includes multiple touch points like email, SMS, etc., where we need to automatically send triggered messages to customers based on their behavior or recommend products by sending personalized messages. It is a great tool that allows us to easily create and manage campaigns and to track and analyze customer behavior in order to optimize the campaign.
Reflektion provides individualized results based off each customer's unique browse experience on the site. This is beneficial because it gets more accurate results than segmenting customers by certain behaviors consistent with other customers.
Reflektion is responsive to our business. They treat each request with professionalism and work to find solutions quickly.
Reflektion has several beneficial features to further enhance the customer experience through a learning environment. Reflektion learns synonyms and is able to adjust for more accurate results. They also provide full page results with faceted navigation which leverages the individualized learning into the product results specific for each customer in a seamless integration with the site.
Evergage plays nicely with most code frameworks and has been very stable. The only situation in which we could not (yet) find a way to use Evergage is in conjunction with Handlebars.js templates.
Enterprise-level data security considerations are well-handled by Evergage. Trust me... as a top-level PCI compliant company that builds travel loyalty solutions for major US banks, we have no greater concern than data security.
"No flicker" synchronous integration is a VERY important feature Evergage offers -- I'm unsure if any other competitors offer the same as I think Evergage has a patent on this. So when the webpage loads, users don't see the original page contents flash before being replaced with personalized/alternate contents.
The powerful user interface is easy-to-use and comes in two flavors: a more traditional CMS-style "admin" view and an on-page WYSIWYG view.
Test use cases in the browser prior to going live.
It's easy to build and measure A/B/n tests, either as rule-based tests, or as % split testing.
I love the ability to create user segments based on "sentence-style" logic structures that incorporates actions, KPIs, even third-party data.
Evergage is built to accommodate everyone from non-technical users to coders. Use the WYSIWYG editor to bring things to life, build complex front-end use cases with Javascript/JQuery, or use the API for control from the server side.
While I mentioned that training our team in using the Reflektion dashboard was quite pain free, the dashboard can get a little overwhelming to a first time user. There are a lot of options and customization features available that can be intimidating at first.
There isn't really too much for us to criticize with Reflektion. As I said, we switched from another product to Reflektion and so far have had almost no issues. When they do come up, the Reflektion team has been very helpful.
Some of the reporting functionality could use some work, but they are making vast improvements.
The catalog user interface for available promotable items could benefit from the ability to customize the viewable columns and add filtering.
The amount of time that Evergage considers a user's session to be active could be increased. I find myself having to log back into the tool multiple times throughout the day, as I will leave the tool to check emails and during that time, I get logged out.
When you first engage with Evergage you have to make a choice on how you're going to use and deploy their product. Are you going to use it for, as is my case, an "in-app" deployment for your SaaS application or for your public facing website. We elected to use it for "in-app" first so we could build knowledge and have a measure of churn reduction. We've done well enough that we're developing a strategy for use on our public facing website now for better lead building and qualification. We're about to double our engagement with Evergage essentially. Evergage has been incredibly responsive. They use great customer service tools and eventually gave us our own account manager. As an IT person, once setup, I intentionally worked to remove myself from the product as a support means so our customer service people are working directly with Evergage and great things are happening. Evergage has just been constantly improving for the better.
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.
Evergage is quick loading and very responsive. We always have concerns about page load time and the integration of Evergage with our websites has never once caused any issue in this regard.
It would be a full 10 except for a couple of times when it took over a week to get a response. Otherwise they are very responsive, very knowledgeable and very helpful. They really have a great team overall, not just support but even account reps are always eager to help and provide ideas and best practices.
Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.
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.
Reflektion is a very cost-effective, complete solution providing individualization for preview search, product recommendations, full page search, and content. Compared to the other services they offered more features utilizing SOLR results but with continued learning. Other services didn't have the full list of capabilities or were much more expensive.
Appcues - I like them. Very easy to use, which is the one main advantage they have over Evergage. That said their simplicity means the tool is limited in what it can do compared to Evergage. Plus Evergage's data logging capabilities in addition to messaging make it more useful for my needs.
Increasing conversion rate is almost always the goal when we start a new project and it is safe to say that Reflektion has helped us increase conversion rate for customers clicking through product recommendations.
With our previous recommendations engine, tweaking and customizing the recommendations on our site was not nearly as effective or easy as it is with Reflektion. This has saved us countless hours in dev and manual operations work.
We have not seen any negative impacts of Reflektion and hope this continues.
Positive: allows better functionality without hiring or diverting a whole team of developers, which would be extremely costly.
Positive: fits into our existing campaign structure neatly without needing a complicated separate process.
Positive: support has been excellent and responsive, quickly aiding and resolving problems.
Negative: can be too powerful, leading to campaigns that break if they are not thoroughly checked before deployment. Also, can become a crutch acting as merely a content management system when it's segmentation capabilities are not understood or explored.
