Why Cloudingo was the choice for me...
January 27, 2016
Why Cloudingo was the choice for me...
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cloudingo
Cloudingo is our primary means of data governance in Salesforce. When I took over the Salesforce database a few years ago I realized just how bad things where in terms of data quality. There are a number of solutions on the AppExchange (some with longer track records) but after demos and trials of a number of them I quickly found that Cloudingo was far more advanced and actually easier to use. In my case, I am cleaning up leads, contacts, accounts based on case history. When I say case I see I mean in a legal sense (not Salesforce cases). We have custom objects that hold a lot of this data and that data is tied to various contacts, accounts and leads.
I am the Salesforce admin by default. I enjoy technology and I like thinking about better ways to do things. Cloudingo has allowed me to clean up our data to a point where we can actually think about outbound marketing and not be worried about doing so.
I am the Salesforce admin by default. I enjoy technology and I like thinking about better ways to do things. Cloudingo has allowed me to clean up our data to a point where we can actually think about outbound marketing and not be worried about doing so.
- The automation engine is extremely powerful. I have over 500 fields on some objects and I want to do different things with that data depending on what the master record is. I was able to configure Cloudingo do all this. i.e. set it and forget it and I just get an emailed report.
- Visualization of the problem areas is completely unique. Cloudingo has a dashboard concept with tiles and those tiles represent ways of looking at the data and potential duplicate records.
- Innovate - every suggestion I've given them they have implemented and then some. Cloudingo really pushes the pace and I am always thankful when new releases come out because they put in cool stuff that I would have never thought of.
- I would love to have a multi-user mode. I realize this very difficult though given I as an admin can see records my peers cannot.
- We literally cut our data size in half and were able to drop extra storage we were paying for with Salesforce.
- Our case managers now have a lot more confidence not only when reaching out to people but I have more confidence in the reporting that I can after the fact.
- It's much faster to identify problem areas in the data when we import lists now and we're able to quickly auto-merge.
I selected Cloudingo because I wanted a cloud-based solution and the user-interface was so easy to understand. It actually out-performed the other tools I evaluated by quite a large margin but more than anything the company as a whole treated me better throughout the process. I can still say after two renewals that I am happy.
Using Cloudingo
3 - The three of us comprise sales operations and marketing. I would say 90% of the use the first few months was operations while we cleaned the data and imported/merged 2 other large data sets into Salesforce using Cloudingo and now marketing is getting involved. We started out years ago using MailChimp but have since graduated to Pardot for its more sophisticated logic and drop campaigns.
4 - I'm more on the technical side with some background in programming and database design. My other 3 users are sales and marketing. They know Salesforce but have no real concept (or never really thought about de-duplication). 2 of the three are basic Salesforce users (under 4 months of experience) and our marketing person is probably at about 2 years.
- The ability to import lists that we get and dedupe them as they come in.
- Automation - we simply don't have the time to keep the data clean so we rely on Cloudingo to be the watchdog (almost like having anti-virus). It just runs in the background and alerts of us anything that fell out of scope (i.e. exception cases). For example, there is a case when I want human eyes on the records and I was able to add that as part of the automation settings.
- Cloud-based - I don't want our staff using their machines' resources to dedupe. They are used to Salesforce and the cloud-model and it is much faster to bring them up to speed if stay within that paradigm.
- Mass Update - Often times we'll find cases where things should have been structured better in our data. For example, we might combine two pick lists into one. With Cloudingo we're able to go and touch all those records and update them accordingly.
- Address Validation - we do a lot of mailings and with address validation built in - it is pretty slick to just automate that whole process through one vendor.
Evaluating Cloudingo and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
Cloudingo Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - The actual implementation of Cloudingo took us less than an hour so change management doesn't really come into the picture. I supposed we could have tried it in the sandbox first but Cloudingo setup isn't making any destructive changes. You can slice and dice the data to see different views of your data to weed out duplicates without actually committing to anything. That is how we did it. We settled on 4 of the out-of-the-box filters plus 3 that we copied and customized to look at specific record types and conditions.
- We didn't hit any issues
Cloudingo Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - It was just a small one with the import wizard and they actually fixed it within the week. They had a small release going out in between larger releases and they were able to get this fix in for me. I was delighted as they had already given me a work around.
I had a case going on about eight months ago that required me importing a lot of data in Salesforce and I called really late with a question. It must have been 10PM on a week night and Steve worked with me for probably 45 minutes while we came up with a game plan. It had nothing to do with Cloudingo and everything to do with our setup that made it hard one to get around. I should point out though that Steve works in Dallas (the entire company is in Dallas). I was just impressed why the whole thing. I would have been up all night had they not picked up the phone.
Using Cloudingo
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Dashboard & File Creation
- Exportable Reports
- Import Wizard
- Import wizard is a little hard to use from a small laptop screen
- Automation engine is a little hard to configure from a small laptop screen