Robust enterprise tool that lacks polish
Updated October 31, 2013
Robust enterprise tool that lacks polish
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua
- Eloqua allows for great customization at the point of integration with your CRM system. The ability to customize your auto syncs and add custom SQL queries gives you the ability to do some smart things with the way you bring in data.
- Custom Data Objects are one of my favorite things about Eloqua. This allows you to create custom tables from a multitude of data sources. All of those custom objects that you create in Salesforce.com are able to be brought in to add all of that intelligence to your marketing efforts.
- Processing steps are a very powerful tool within Eloqua. These execute in near real time and allow many of their cloud connectors to integrate right onto a form for you to handle and create data right now.
- Eloqua is a robust platform that offers a ton of features. That being said I feel like a lot of things are completed 90%. There are a lot of features that are present in some areas but not in others. For example you can define what time you send a batch email on a processing step but you can't define an additional parameter to tell it when to send and when not to. On the other hand sending a single email you can add a parameter on who to send to for a single email send but can't control the time the email is sent. Timing is so important in marketing especially in event communication. This is one of many examples like this within the tool.
- Things break in Eloqua a lot! The most frustrating thing is that there are very few notifications from the system to let you know this. Auto syncs have notifications when they don't run, but the date to 'run next' often gets corrupted and displays a date in the past causing it not to run and no error report is sent. When something like campaign associations stop working in Eloqua there is no way to know unless you or another user reports back that they aren't seeing their campaign members. In addition to this when you do report things to support I feel like they are reluctant to recognize the software is not working properly or understand the business impact of the product not functioning. This really taints my experience with the product on a regular basis.
- Product execution. Eloqua update releases are a huge pain point. I have yet to see a release come out that doesn't break something in our instance since I've been an Eloqua user. Testing is so important in product releases I don't understand how this continues to happen. You can see this same lack of attention to detail in their newer version of Eloqua, E10. The biggest pain point preventing us from making the migration is the fact that they have replaced Salesforce.com campaign ids with their own Eloqua campaign ids which makes that whole integration a headache that was once so simple, especially when you have 1000s of campaigns already running with the SFDC ids.
- Eloqua overall offers a great ROI to your sales team. The marketing team is able to process leads or contacts, process and place values on them to pass to your CRM system in a completely customizable manner. Theses values allow your sales team to prioritize and interact with their leads or engaged contacts in an efficient way.
- In the marketing world the ability to deliver the right content at the right time is invaluable. Assuming you have the content piece taken care of, Eloqua's program builder makes the rest very easy to achieve and understand with a feature that functions like a flow chart does. We use dozens of customized nurture programs to makes this happen based on custom values. We use things like marketing stage fields in conjunction with custom date stamps that you can place during lead activity to determine when to deliver your content.
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- Product Features
- Product Usability
Again this was all about how the product work flow is built out. The power of associating campaigns on a form processing step, as well as many other processing step functions is a huge win for us.