Sendoso is a gift sending platform designed to support B2B sales and ABM, and provide a sales accelerant.
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SwagUp
Score 7.1 out of 10
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SwagUp in Piscataway aims to bring simplicity and quality to the world of branded swag. The solution provides swag packs for employee welcoming, client gifting, and event attendees. The service is paired with warehousing and fulfillment services.
For the most part when we have been curating our own swag and having it sent to the warehouse we have had great luck at keeping our costs minimal and then curating a holiday or themed swag box for our staff to be sent. The ease at which we can set up a build your own box and have it curated how we like is fantastic and super helpful. We love the touch of the "handwritten" notes as well! Our team always say they love these. There have been a few instances where we had issues with Sendoso and how something was handled. One example is when we created and ordered glass travel mugs from KeepCup to be sent to our team. Some of them arrived damaged and they were rejected before we could even do anything about it, we were told after the fact and not given any ability to work with the Vendor for replacements and Sendoso with a plan to use the cups that were still in tact. Through this we lost 4 boxes of inventory and hundreds of dollars of swag for our team and clients - which doesn't sound like a lot but w are a small company and this has a bit impact on us. Not to mention resolving this issue then took 5+ months of admin power and time. In the end we didn't get much resolve and being the customer in the situation felt like we were in between two companies and their policies, KeepCup did all they could to work with us for a resolution but Sendoso didn't. We felt like we got the short end of the stick in this instance
In my experience, it was a horribly complicated process with an account manager, who takes things very personally in my opinion. SwagUp came highly recommended from some client-serving companies, who I believe, apparently, spend a lot of money with them. For a company that is supposed to help other companies wow their clients, I find their customer service is woefully lacking in my opinion. I believe “swag” doesn’t make up for the bad service. Not recommended because I believe I did not get the customer service or product fulfillment I expected when initially choosing this product, service, and company.
The Custom Brand Shop has been a real game-changer.
Easy to place curation requests and quick responses.
The ability to send items through Amazon but also include inventoried items is great for higher value gift bundles and lets you avoid having to source items that you may not be 100% sure about the quantity needed.
We're very sticky with Sendoso and would prefer to not train the entire sales org on a new platform! That and we've already sent up a plethora of gifts the team can send out (eGifts, physical branded items, treats, plants, etc.).
The platform is continually being upgraded to make sure the platform is usable and prevents unnecessary errors. Once you get used to the platform you can get in there and build eGift touches, physical gifts, etc. quickly. You an also send quickly and in a variety of ways. The address confirmation feature makes sending when you don't know where your recipient lives is very helpful
Sendoso occasionally has downtime, but it's usually isolated to a single feature and doesn't effect the entire platform. They are responsive when it comes to intaking these outages and are quick to work to resolve them
Their platform doesn't take a long time to load, and it typically isn't too buggy once a new feature has been out for a while. Reports are pretty quick to generate and are emailed to the user on file for use typically within ten minutes or so. I have not noticed Sendoso slowing down any of the software it integrates with at all
They listened to the problem with delivery times but did not present a reasonable solution. Again, the shipping costs consumed too much budget. On one bulk send their support team agreed to take over a project for a few of the reps which is encouraging to see.
We have an active order in with SwagUp at this moment for $1400+, but the poor customer service, complicated process, the entitled attitude of their account manager who is on some sort of weird power trip, and the fact that our clients won't ever be receiving what we ordered makes that amount irrelevant in my opinion and experience. I feel like the time I wasted with their account manager was worth much more than what we spent with SwagUp. First of all, I’m not the type to be critical of anyone doing their job. People are busy, tech has issues, emails get lost, etc. in our digital world. It happens and true professionals who work online understand that. Unfortunately, in my opinion, there are employees who don’t get this and feel entitled to express their emotions freely. I believe that while this doesn’t harm them, it definitely harms the bottom line of the company. In my opinion, an angry and insulted client WILL spread the word about said company - which is precisely what I will do. Let's talk about this what I feel like is a completely unprofessional account manager first, because, in my opinion, this is the type of employee who causes companies to bleed revenue unless they are checked. The call was recorded, so whoever is in charge can feel free to review it for consistency. The purpose of my call was simple - to smooth out what I believe was a simple miscommunication. In my opinion, what should have been a simple process became stalled because the person who I feel like was an entitled account manager was more concerned with flexing his “client boundary” muscles than actually doing his job, which was taking care of the account. I believe that an account manager who gets upset and emotional because he didn’t receive a response to an email, and who can’t even disguise that fact on a zoom call, needs to fix it or work elsewhere. Because if he had this attitude with me, I feel like lord knows how many others of his accounts are receiving the same treatment. During my experience, here are a few statements I believe he made on the call: -I believe he talked about how my business was “not the type of clients SwagUp wants to work with”… -I believe he complained out how it was “unfair” it was to bring up their January 18th delay. -I believe he asked, “what sort of company we run” (because an email was missed - even though from my understanding from SwagUp, communication is encouraged mainly through their portal). -I believe he proceeded to talk about “how busy” he was and had other people to talk to, while he was on the call with me, a paying client. -I believe he also complained about third-party vendors and stated that they (SwagUp) don’t even want to have third-party materials sent to them (which to me, is confusing as a customer, because then why on earth do you even allow it through your product and service?) -I believe he denied that the company had anything to do with “fulfillment” and then proceeded to try to explain what sort of company SwagUp was. Nevermind that when our order was delayed the email literally started with (what I believe is a copy and pasted message) “You are receiving this message because we've been notified that your order is experiencing a longer than normal fulfillment timeline.” -During my experience, after what I feel like was him constantly implying that our company was incompetent because we missed an email, he proceeded to give what I felt like was a half-hearted “apology” and state that “he hopes we consider SwagUp in the future”. After all of this happened during my experience with them, I informed him that we would not based on what I felt like was his horrible customer service to me, and guess what Mr. Emotional Customer Service does? I believe he ended the call by saying, “Well, the feeling is mutual”. With all of that personal customer service experience I had out of the way, here’s the context of our experience using SwagUp: We began the process with SwagUp on November 29th. Mockups were completed and approved on December 28th. In the meantime, we had originally wanted to add a third-party item to our order, so they linked us up with an account executive. Throughout the process, the account executive was adamant that we use the SwagUp dashboard to stay informed of the progress of our materials and order. In my opinion, based on my experience there with the account executive, the implication was that everything could be one on there (SwagUp dashboard). The problem, in my opinion, is (and now I know) that it can’t. On January 18th, our order was delayed. The message I believe we received was: “We know you and your recipients are looking forward to receiving your custom swag and understand the frustration of missing holiday expectations. We appreciate your patience, apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to getting you your order as soon as possible.” No complaints on our part for that. On the 20th, our account manager reached out to ask about the third-party material we requested to be included. Unfortunately, on our part, due to a personnel change, the email thread was archived. Nevertheless, we were informed it was shipped to their warehouse. However, at this time on their online portal (SwagUp dashboard), where we were previously constantly encouraged to check for updates, there was nothing to see in my opinion. I couldn't find any new updates or any new information. As far as we knew at that point, our order was still delayed. Bear in mind that at this point in our experience, we had paid our invoice and were assuming that SwagUp still had logistics problems due to COVID and other factors mentioned in their email. On February 16th, I believe the account manager emailed to state that due to lack of responsiveness, they were going to go ahead and pack the packages without the third-party material we had requested. I believe we did not hear back from SwagUp till February 21st when were informed that our order was ready to ship. This is when my customer service experience began, which was when the account manager was called and I believe his entire attitude was based around being upset that his emails were not responded to. In my experience, he kept repeating that under no circumstances would they place our requested material in the boxes - never mind that I didn’t even call about that. I never asked, but during our call, it seemed like to me that he got some sort of kick out of explaining how their process worked and why he would send the boxes back, which was information that I had no interest in hearing because I didn’t call about any of that. It seemed to me that he wasn't informed that SwagUp had delayed the process and that we received no feedback from their portal, which I feel like they heavily push. The craziest part, in my opinion, was that at the end of everything, he STILL redirected us to the portal to fill out everything else. I recommend SwagUp to listen up. This company (SwagUp) *looks* good as a brand. I understand that logistics is tough. This could have been a good experience - even just using your portal, but, in my opinion, there are two issues: 1) Your third-party fulfillment is clunky and 2) Your account managers (the human element) need to be better managed and trained based on my experience. Just because they had a poor experience with one client, I hope they don't treat all other clients with the disdain and disrespect that I feel like I experienced during my time using SwagUp. In my experience, we still paid for our product on time and fulfilled every aspect of the complicated process, despite a delay, which we never complained about. Even though we requested it, our third-party order will not even be included when it's shipped out to our clients – and we still had no complaints either. But, in my opinion, what we won’t put up with or will actively share is an employee that I believe is emotional, condescending, and acts like he owns the company towards clients.
Our in person trainings were on zoom, but they are not recordings which is why I listed them as in person. You get a live person to walk you through integrations, how to use the platform, sendings best practices, setting up other users, etc. The customer success team will help you training staff users too. Ours even ran a contest for them to encourage them to send to prospects and they provided the prize!
These were CSM and Onboarding team zoom meetings where they hand-hold you, which is nice especially compared to other company onboardings. After that they have Zen desk articles and regular check-ins where you can get the training you need. I also am on a slack channel with Sendoso staff where I can ask additional questions or look for best practices.
Get Sales and Marketing both involved in the implementation so you can strategize on how you'd want to use it across your organization. This will help your CSM roll it out the way you want instead of trying to piecemeal it after you've finished the onboarding process. Also I would recommend using a mix of Sendoso Direct, Inventory and eGift sends. Relying all on one or the other will not serve you well
Local vendors, including print & mail houses, are the only thing I can compare to Sendoso for similar services. Local vendors are good for ordering a bunch of swag to have at the office or [giving] away at conferences but if you are looking to send items to clients/prospects on-demand then a tool like Sendoso is a must.
SwagUp has more options to order swag and items for the organization and is more user-friendly, the others are but SwagUp is easier to figure out on the first try!
Sendoso has really improved here. Along with helping you train your staff, you can now clone gift touches, sync them with salesforce from the platform directly, and send out address confirmations using your own or their email sending platform - they also just released an option for you to white-label your own domain. helping you save time and get a lot off the ground quickly
Negative- The process takes too long, comes with delays, and based on my experience, involved a lot of miscommunication.
Negative- In my experience, I believe the account manager was rude and entitled.
Negative- In my opinion, employees may say one thing, but their automated portal proceeds at a different rate, so I feel like there is constantly conflicting information for the customer.
