Simplify360 vs. Skype (discontinued) vs. Zoom Workplace

To talk directly to the Simplify 360 management and take a call post that. One of the key aspects of investing in any enterprise software is how easy the implementation is and how much support that a company can get in the early implementation process. We have had a quick ramp up learning the tool and had constant interactions with the team at Simplify to better understand and manage issues or get questions answered

Having interacted with a new replacement tool, Microsoft Teams, it is challenging to recommend Skype, as it lacks some essential features, such as being less equipped with the latest updates, and it is not platform-independent, causing issues on PCs and phones, as well as during calls that might hinder work.

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Zoom Workplace is ideal for any business looking for a communication/collaboration solution. This is more so for businesses with a hybrid workforce. It makes holding virtual meetings and collaboration sessions easy, and teams can participate seamlessly thanks to features such as Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Teams chat, and Zoom Phone, among others. In a nutshell, Zoom Workplace makes teamwork and productivity easy.

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• BeFirst publishes to multiple social channels for clients. The publishing module makes publishing very easy and effective.
• Workflow allows our team to handle customer service requests and brand management issues very quickly to maintain a company's reputation.
• The ease of set up in the listening module, makes brand reputation very effective.
• The platform does offer platform provide sentiment analysis, and it works great. The team has found that is very easy to keep up conversations and answer customer for clients or forward the infomation to said client.

• The instant chat function is great. Very straightforward, easy to use, easy to learn, no technical issues.
• Video calls are pretty easy also, user friendly and a mostly stable connection with no issues.
• Voice calls are easy also, eliminates the need for an external landline or the need to use your cell phone. Clear connections, not really any dropped calls.

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• Audio quality of phone calls is spot on. Calls are clear and crisp.
• Video quality of video meetings are clear and there aren't any pixelization artifacts that some systems can have.
• Having AI summaries have been life changing for us. We no longer have to concentrate on note taking, like we did in the past. The summaries are accurate and enable us to put our efforts in the meeting or conversation. Plus, we can save them into our practice management system as required.

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• I will like to see some improvement in the intuitiveness of the system. There are some great features hidden behind the curtains.

• Skype is a RESOURCE hog. People who have limited bandwidth will have poor call quality.
• It is hard to figure out how to use emojis and upload images in the chat.
• The background images do not fool anybody....it is clearly not your real background.

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• I don't think there is any malfunction in their solution; it's extremely convenient to use, be it creating a meeting invite, adding people, sending any extra stuff to them. It's quick, and this is the only tool that works seamlessly even on Androids.

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We have a great relationship with the Simplify team and anyone in our team is able to reach out to them and get answers to questions is a wonderful benefit of working with them. Also we have collaborated with the team to enhance the product, which again is a very welcome gesture from a company that sells a product that helps enterprises listen in to people and support them.

I have given this rating as this need to give more than that as it's very helpful for us and makes our work more efficient and fast.

We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.

Skype is not as good as Facetime in terms of ease to glance at it and figure out how it works. I think that's a result of Skype trying to be too many things at once. A lot of the menu and UI could be streamlined, and I would jettison some of the additional functions that have been tacked on over the years to simplify. That being said, while some options are slightly hard to find, they all work flawlessly once found.

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Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.

There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.

Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.

I am not aware of the current support level for Skype for business, as I have never used even though I have the product. However, the support for Skype's personal paid users is not where it could be. Users who pay for Skype features do not have a clear path to reach out to support. So, rating 6, can be better as soon as I need to use Skype for business support and get a good experience. I will say that I will renew Skype for Business subscription, which is a significant inconsistency on my end. The explanation is that Skype for Business comes bundled with Office for Business, with no additional cost, so why not.

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Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.

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It can be used on the phone via mobile application as well as on the desktop by logging in to the website. Easily installed and ready to use.

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If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.

In side by side analysis, Simplify 360 was much easier to set up teams, work flow and the brand monitoring was quite a bit more accurate

We use Skype in combination with Grasshopper. While Grasshopper acts as a routing toll free number with extensions, if we are making calls directly, we do it through Skype. Skype's desktop and mobile apps are easier to use, and provide unlimited local calls at a flat, affordable rate. Allowing our team to use their existing mobile or desktop devices without additional hardware for business office phone calls is important, and Skype makes that possible

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Teams do not stack up to Zoom at all. My clients use Teamas because it is a corporate policy, and they use it most of the time between employees of the same company. It makes sense for this, NOT for me. Every time a Teams meeting is launched, since I am not part of this company, the meeting is laborious, the interface is not as nice as Zoom's, sharing documents is more difficult, etc., etc. Zoom is superior to Teams in every way!!!

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The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.

Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.

The service provided is up to date, as discussed before buying.

Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.

• Reduction of weekly and monthly report building time by over 70%
• Lead generation increased by over 30%.
• Online brand negativity neutralized by over 80%.

• Skype made keeping in touch with an advisor in Mexico very easy. The initiative there resulted in 5 new partnerships.
• Skype has helped me with account management for at least 3 customers in LATAM--usually it's a fast way to answer a question about a support renewal.
• For about 9 months Skype helped me stay in touch with a colleague in Prague. We would meet once a week to go over sales activities.

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• Cost savings and improvement of call routing switching from land line to Zoom soft phone technology (moved from Verizon)
• The Business license platform is always evolving and including new technology and tools - without raising our prices - a great business model
• We were able to drop our separate service for after hours / on-call services and created IVR/queues for handling after hours calls
• Integration with Outlook and Salesforce and proven to be a time saver for scheduling events and meetings

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