Revinate is a hotel reputation management tool, with email marketing tools, surveys for customer feedback (to drive reviews to Google and TripAdvisor), and a dashboard to monitor all online reviews and social media mentions.
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Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
Revinate is a great platform for smaller-sized hotels who do not need the advanced functionalities of a larger ESP like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You do not need coding experience, but if you would like to custom-code your emails you can do so. The automation features leave room for improvement as does its reporting features
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
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).
Streamline how we answer reviews further. I feel like we should not have to log into Revinate and log into third party sites to answer reviews. Revinate would have partnerships with these third parties to streamline the review answering process.
I also don't like how Revinate will not give direct access to Wyndham franchise users. We have to log into a MyPortal account and then into Revinate using the MyPortal link. It would be more efficient to have direct access and capabilities.
Make your report creation area user-friendly. You don't offer much training or help assistance in learning to create reports.
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.
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.
Revinate is perfect for our small-to-medium sized hotel clients who do not need a more advanced ESP. If you have a larger client that needs more advanced features, I would suggest using Salesforce. If you require more in-depth reporting and automation features for a small to mid sized client, Mailchimp is also a great choice. I do not recommend TravelClick for any clients.
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.
Our ROI with Revinate has helped us take back some of our OTA revenue, and for the first time ever, our brand.com revenue outpaced our OTA revenue, due to our email campaigns. We are a small indie hotel and this is crucial for us.
