Square Customers vs. Text-Em-All vs. VerticalResponse

Square is absolutely brilliant if you are just starting out and your business has both an in-person and an online component to it, as Square will solve both in-person POS and online booking/billing. Square also offers the option to create a free website for your company, though it is a very basic site, if you don't have a website yet, this is a VERY helpful option, as it takes away a huge cost. Square allowed us to be up and running in no time, taking away the need to worry about an expensive appointment-setting add-on from our current website provider (Square integrates quite nicely with our current site). Square is probably less ideal for more advanced users or companies with a need for more detailed inventory/service management. But even then, Square will more than likely be able to get the job done!

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We have found them to be very good for immediate communication of a brief message to a large number of people at once. Thus, it works perfectly for a neighborhood association. It may not be suitable for longer messages or situations with excessive notifications.

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For businesses requiring advanced email marketing features like sophisticated automation, in-depth analytics, and extensive customization, VerticalResponse might fall short due to its limited featuresVerticalResponse is ideal for small businesses or freelancers who need a simple, straightforward email marketing tool. Its ease of use and basic features make it suitable for those without extensive technical expertise in email marketing

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• Sales pipeline
• Customer engagement
• Marketing

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• Scheduled delivery: works as it should every time and is SUPER convenient.
• Mass contact upload: I was able to pull a report to excel and it loaded PERFECTLY to ‘Contacts’
• Feedback: if anyone doesn’t get the message, I will know almost immediately.

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• I love the ease of list builder because we often times have a lot of data to import. It would be simply impossible without this tool, considering the amount of customer data we have for any one given email.
• We really enjoy the ease of use of the HTML wizard as well. It helps even a novice be able to make a beautiful and attention grabbing email.
• The dashboard is functional and easy to find when you need with a quick search.

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• Some of the build quality on the peripherals could feel a bit better.
• Have more options for businesses with more credit card transactions such as monthly or discounted per transaction once a certain number is reached.
• Have functionality to allow for a typed card number without the higher fee if the software verifies there is a hardware/read error with the card.

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• My initial concern was regarding the "opt out" feature. I work with the senior population, and many of whom are not that tech-savvy. I have a couple of residents who had unintentionally opted out of messages thinking it was an individual message they were skipping. I would suggest that there be a clarifying question when a user chooses to opt out; it should default to opting out of a single message and survey the user to see if they would like to opt out of receiving additional messages. My residents were wondering why they were missing information and why I hadn't informed them of important dates and events.

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• The type face is small. Not sure if this is to avoid overwhelming the reader, but I could see this being an issue with vision-impaired people or people who don't see small print well.
• Sometimes I find it takes multiple clicks to make one simple change. I wish there was a search field at the top of the screen that allowed me to jump directly to a client's entry to update it there.

Text-Em-All is a great way to get messages to our associates versus posting on a memo board and hoping they see it. Very efficient. I would recommend this great tool to companies big or small as a form of business related communications. The only thing I would change is the ability to use more characters in the messages. And it would be a plus if you can translate to different languages in the app.

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Product is easy for both technical and non-technical people to use. A cost effective solution for sending out large number of messages. We can manage unsubscribes by individual accounts, so we can have multiple multiple accounts combined to maximize our buying power on credits. Effective API for sending/receiving data makes tool a valuable asset.

The user interface is easy to navigate - that's not always the case for some software! I look for something that is intuitive, easy to use, and doesn't take a ton of training to get up and running quickly.

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It's fantastic. In general, it's a 10. But I give it a 7 because of the way I know it can improve. I save my workers' names in lists...and I have only the first and last name fields to classify them. I grade my workers based on their experiences and based on their jobs; so I use the last name field to group them. This could be easier by you adding another field.

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I truly love this product. We are moving to an all-in-one system next year and my greatest fear in doing so is how much I will miss this platform. Although we are excited for things ahead, I will always keep Vertical Response in my back pocket incase I don't love the new platform as much

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The availability of the text em all is amazing specially when we needed the most to spread out the word on an event that was happening.

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Never had an issue with uptime

I love the performance it provided us. Also, want to clarify that the time it takes to send out a mass text is amazing

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No issues

Square is mostly focused on FAQs and online support, and they do a very good job creating a rich knowledge base. But, if you are not very tech savvy, it could be easy to feel a bit overwhelmed. I would recommend that they add a direct line or chat feature to call, rather than email or Knowledge base first. This might be due to staffing issues at Square, so perhaps it is the best they can do for now.

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There have been few times over the last 18 years that I have had to make changes to our billing or deal with particular tech questions and I have never had any issues with their response time or ability to be helpful once the issues were communicated

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At Vertical Response the help desk associates are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. You can tell they enjoy what they do. And clearly, they are well trained because most times, the first point of contact is able to resolve any issue you may have. There have been very few times where an associate has needed to get back to me or escalate me to a supervisor

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Basic functions and online help...we used what was needed, at the time, and will continue to explore other online trainings as our functional needs expand

This was the best way we were able to reach out to everyone we wanted to, being that there were some not tech-sabi elderly people. This was a better way for them to be able to get the information they needed.

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Salesforce integration never worked right. We had to abandon.

A lot easier to use than Infusionsoft!!

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Our last provider was costly for what we needed. We need the ability to text, and that's it. The sense was challenging to navigate; I had to sign a one-year contract and pay thousands upfront. Text-em-all has been the best thing.

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In addition to using Vertical Response personally I also manage email marketing for clients that already use Mailchimp, Robly and Constant Contact. While most of these platforms all offer similar features I choose Vertical Response first if the client does not have a platform in place. Typically I am also teaching the client how to use this tool and the Vertical Response visual interface is very easy for me to teach a client how to navigate and create their own campaigns.

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Seems like a fair price for the product

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We have never had a problem being able to use Text em all when we needed it

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• This has allowed me to accept credit / debit transactions without having to have a monthly subscription to a service and lose money on times of no to little use, allowing me to have a broader customer range as checks are risky.
• All of my initial equipment was free and there were no startup costs so my return was immediate.
• The small fee taken out of the transaction is very much worth the ability to accept nearly all plastic transactions.

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• We definitely have a higher response rate when we contact applicants via text message; it seems to be the thing people check more often than email now.
• It saves us a lot of time wasted before with "phone tag" when employees are unable to immediately to take a call.

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• We were able to blast out promotions our company was having to customers which created an increase in business.
• By blasting out any service issues, it keeps our customers informed so that they are not wondering what is going on.
• Allows us to store unsubscribed emails so that we are not constantly pestering people who do not want to be emailed.

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