Bloomfire Spreads Like Wildfire - It's That Good!
July 18, 2017
Bloomfire Spreads Like Wildfire - It's That Good!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bloomfire
We use Bloomfire as a knowledge management system (KMS) to help teams record their work, find visibility into other teams' ideas, and collaborate on resources or projects more easily. We originally chose Bloomfire for the Marketing department's use only, but it has since spread to several partner departments and teams. We were trying to:
- reduce emails, asking peers, and searching for information or resources
- improve findability of Clearlink-specific knowledge, processes, resources, and data
- offer a platform for Clearlinkers to share their unique job knowledge
- increase collaboration and sharing across individual marketing teams
- reduce emails, asking peers, and searching for information or resources
- improve findability of Clearlink-specific knowledge, processes, resources, and data
- offer a platform for Clearlinkers to share their unique job knowledge
- increase collaboration and sharing across individual marketing teams
- The search function within Bloomfire is incredibly smart and intuitive to use. It not only recommends highly relevant posts and series, but also recommends team members with related expertise so you have a "people resource" to contact as well.
- Bloomfire's interface is clean, simple, and highly customizable. I was able to set it up myself with very little HTML knowledge and minimal help from my onboarding coach.
- The support team at Bloomfire is incredible. They listen to every idea, suggestion, and complaint; respond quickly; and are super clear in their communication. They also offer a customer-centric knowledge base through their own tool that's a great place to learn about your new software system.
- Bloomfire met all of our technical requirements as well: it's compatible with SSO, housed in the cloud, has massive storage capabilities, and so on.
- There's a built-in webcast/screencast recorder, and the system automagically transcribes any video you upload - this was a HUGE selling point for us! The ability to record on-screen demos and meetings and have a full transcript of each recording is unheard of in other KMS softwares.
- There are a few areas where Bloomfire has frustrated my team: the WYSIWYG editor in Posts is a little clunky (doesn't use conventional keyboard shortcuts, etc.); the way the system handles snippets of code isn't up to my dev team's spec (but I keep reminding them it is a tool for Marketing and that's why they have Git); they are currently working on a beta version of the Post editor, and sometimes the legacy editor handles tasks better than the beta, and vice versa.
- We haven't had the software rolled out and adopted long enough yet to establish an ROI, but I'm actively watching it. (The internal analytics on who is using Bloomfire and how has helped me better shape the system and our communication around it to users' needs, though - I love them!)
Bloomfire met all of our technical requirements, as well as a lot of the UI/interface requirements. The system is clean, elegantly simple, and not overly featured - it knows exactly what it does and doesn't do. (Ie: it's not a chat tool, it's not a substitute for email, it's not a reporting tool, etc.) For me, one of the biggest selling points was the sales process itself - the Bloomfire team was incredibly knowledgeable, not pushy, quickly available on my schedule, easy to work with, and made me confident that if I chose Bloomfire, that was the kind of support I would get as a customer as well. All of these were points missing from the other tools I researched (and I started with a list of 150, whittled down to these 5).