Item: DemandTools
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DemandTools

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team mostly uses DemandTools to mass update records in our database. Using this tool allows us to update hundreds of records in seconds rather than minutes or hours when we were manually updating records one at a time.

It has decreased manual entry time in our Member Services area allowing agents and management to spend more time on core functions and less time on data entry. The speed of DemandTools has also improved our data integrity as records are updated faster and manual entry errors are avoided.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Mass updates hundreds or thousands of records in a few seconds. With a few clicks, my records are accurate and up to date.
Identify and merge duplicates. We have also used DemandTools to find duplicate records in our database that would have been much harder to merge manually.

Cons

The user interface is very basic and, for me at least, is not intuitive at all. I was told early on that the benefit of the tool is all in its power and not in its UX and that's very true. The tool seems to be made more for BI and data folks than for users like myself (in marketing) and that makes it really hard to navigate and troubleshoot issues.
I know there are a lot of DemandTools tutorials but I have not found them as helpful as I'd have liked as I don't feel they are basic enough. I am not on the data side of things but would love to use DemandTools to do more with duplicates and data updating. However, I have not been able to find resources to help me do that without the assistance of someone on our data team.
I would love to see a step-by-step tutorial or how-tos for things like duplicate identification or record merging. An interface where I could input what I am trying to do and then resources of how-to videos are shown. This may exist but if it does I am not sure where it is!

Return on Investment

Definitely time savings as manual data entry is highly reduced
Cost savings through duplicate cleanup, which decreases mailing costs
Data integrity enhancements, which lead to more accurate member data, which decreases customer service issues due to bad data.

Alternatives Considered

I haven't used anything like DemandTools.

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, FileZilla, Google Drive

Likelihood to Recommend

For our team, DemandTools is well suited for mass updating records with the same information. We use it to update our member file with mailings, outreach, and thank-you gift fulfillment. Another scenario is for identifying and merging duplicate contacts en mass. We have used it to clean up member accounts by easily identifying duplicates and allowing us to select the records we want to merge. DemandTools then merges those records in seconds.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Powerful tool that saves time and money

Modules Used