Evergage Awesomeness with Little IT Involvement!
Updated September 22, 2014
Evergage Awesomeness with Little IT Involvement!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Evergage Pro
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Evergage is currently being used by our customer service department and will be expanding to our marketing department. Evergage is deployed on an internal SAAS subscription application and we have plans to extend it elsewhere. We're primarily using this solution to gain insight and transparency into our user engagement for accounts and the users within the accounts. We're able to get detailed information about how our customers are using our application which can be used to tailor customer onboarding experiences, find unspoken issues clients may be having and identify those customers that are fully engaged. We're able to integrate this information into Salesforce so our sales front-line and our customer service (which also use Salesforce) has relevant information at their fingertips. Besides a tracking and reporting kind of transparency, Evergage has an amazing ability to highly target and segment users and provide in-app messaging at the right moment. It's these kinds of messaging opportunities that promote better overall engagement.
- Little to no IT resources needed. We choose Evergage because of their strength in how their product works. IT has very little daily support of this product which makes it an ideal solution to put in the hands of non-IT people to grow and manage it's use.
- Excellent support. Getting setup with Evergage and fully utilizing it takes time but they have outstanding support. Good dedicated people and an ever-growing knowledgebase that is extremely helpful and well illustrated. I can't ask for more from an IT perspective because my non-IT users have at least 3 avenues of support from Evergage before involving me.
- Simplicity of design. Evergage is always improving their user experience and greatly simplifying what users have to do in order to do highly powerful and complex things. The segmenting tools are dead simple and creating a messaging campaign (in browser, and directly on your site) is really easy.
- Integration and API are big strengths as well. It already integrates with SalesForce, NetSuite and a few others right out of the box to make that easy to get or integrate information across platforms. What struck me as amazing is that Evergage has a great REST api so you can push a lot of custom data to them and really use them as a complete engagement platform.
- One of Evergage's best features is it's ability for non-technical people, through a Chrome-Browser plug-in, to create a user-interface message within (or popup) on a website. The type of message is super flexible, it can be intrusive, or subtle, you decide. I love this feature but it could still use a bit more work in trying to make it easier for non-technical people to use it. The learning curve on this feature is tough but really rewarding if someone on your team is comfortable doing it. I feel like it needs a "Basic" and "Advanced" mode.
- I'd like to see more customization available on the Evergage homepage dashboard. It's a bit locked down but it would be nice to setup and see other measurements there.
- One thing I'd like to see is the ability to create some custom reporting at the account and user level so I could export to PDF / Excel for use in meetings or empower our customer service people through client conversations.
- Identifying users and accounts that may be at risk of churn! I can't emphasize this one enough. Having a solid view and engagement score of users and account activity has enabled us to change our customer service department from being reactive to proactive. We've reduced our churn rate.
- We've been able to increase user adoption. Through our segmenting of users and campaign strategy, we've been able to promote users into taking new actions (adopting new features).
- We've have eliminated the need to utilize IT resources for customer messaging and marketing automation. Evergage is a very rich and powerful tool that puts the effort in the hands of customer service and marketing professionals.
- We've been able to calculate that our successes with Evergage just on a customer service side for churn reduction and proactive client engagement has resulted in Evergage more than paying for itself - the ultimate return on investment not easily found in other products.
- One great area for customer service ROI is the ability to provide in-app messaging for help-text related messages for common occurring things in our SaaS application. Our customer service people see this as a 'training' advantage. It's saved them from responding to common things, especially for what we can target as newer users. So new users are getting messaged in-app while we're not annoying seasoned users.
I haven't used another platform that is similar to Evergage. The truth is I did a very broad evaluation of many products and services before choosing Evergage and I truly didn't find anything that was quite like Evergage. When I did evaluations what seemed to come up a lot was Marketo and HubSpot. Truthfully, I think there is a place for all 3 of those tools if you have the budget but they are very different tools. I can't really make good comparisons for evaluations between them since my needs were rather specific and I felt Evergage was the solution to best suite my needs for shining transparency on user adoption, engagement in hopes of churn reduction.
Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
4 - Right now Evergage is focused in our customer service department. There is one IT person to handle the integration of the javascript beacon to control what data gets sent to Evergage, including custom data. The customer service people are actively working on building out user segments and messaging campaigns for training and user adoption. Customer service is also using the Evergage as a platform for engagement to gain insight into user accounts and user activity to help reduce churn and raise attention on accounts that may go stagnant or loose adoption.
2 - One IT for the beacon, and primarily one person, a customer service person, that has become the product knowledge point for segmenting and user messaging. She's not a technical person, but she's very good at web related use and picked up the adoption of Evergage rather quickly.
- Reducing churn rate - the visibility into user engagement and the ability to customize the engagement score itself has given us some great opportunities with clients to step in and take proactive action where we had no transparency before.
- Building qualified leads - we anticipate building out the same kind of engagement platform for our public website to help build better, more qualified leads for our sales people.
- Web personalization - Evergage has a great user segmenting tool that allows us to build out strong in-app messaging and content placement for our users based on their personal experience and behavior.
- Training - I didn't even imagine this, but our customer service people identified common recurring questions users would submit feeling ultimately 'blocked' on completing something. With Evergage, they started providing in-app messaging to help provide answers in-app where it was contextually relevant and appropriate (i.e. the user clicked something).
- Our marketing people have found a way to push related content titles to our users where it is relevant to what they are doing.
- We've seen an increase in sales for some services because of some slight in-app placement messaging essentially advertising the service where appropriate and relevant.
- We look forward to building out the deployment for our front-end public facing website to build better lead generation.
- We can't wait to push out fresh content suggestions that are relevant to the page you're on for our website. Our marketing people are very excited about this.
- We're starting to use Everage as a total engagement platform and we're able to push out custom data from our database into Evergage to help us in the segmentation process.
- Evergage has a great SalesForce integration, we've only scratched the surface here and look forward to doing more to expose user / account engagement metrics to our sales folks and also to marry SalesForce information back to Evergage.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - These aren't traditional phases, but the first phase is to get the javascript beacon implemented so that you're sending data to the Evergage system. It's only after you have this data that you can start to make sense of it, troubleshoot it, adjust your beacon and the data you're sending, etc. Then, once that has settled you begin diving into the Evergage platform itself, labeling your site actions, setting up your dashboard, segments, campaigns, and more. There isn't a traditional plan for how you implement and you can be up and running in roughly 30-60 days. The only reason for the time frame is the amount of data you want to capture.
Change management was minimal - Our organization had to dedicate people to the product's use, which is not uncommon for any new software roll-out.
- Being able to properly set up a test group of individuals for test message campaigns. Not really a big deal or significant, it just took a bit longer than expected, thankfully they had a knowledgebase article for this.
- Ramping up users took time to understand Evergage and master the in-app messaging component.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio 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 |
Not Available
Support is handled as part of our contract. Evergage has great support and it's a standard experience for working with them.
Yes - Yes, in many cases when we're report issues, we'd get answers in a manner of hours and results within a day if not faster. We've had excellent communication with Evergage staff all around.
Honestly, they have always provided exceptional support to us. I can think of one time we were having a common problem and could not get our messages to work during testing for our internal group. Evergage did screen sharing meetings with us to try and verify the result, they were given their own customer account to test and were very active in troubleshooting and communicating status. It took a few days but they ultimately found out that their javascript beacon wasn't loading properly on a few of our pages due to some IT changes. The Director of Customer Success was even involved in our case and has been absolutely wonderful to work with.
Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | Requires technical support Lots to learn |
- Getting the Javascript beacon integrated into your site is relatively easy to do. It offers some customization so you can send up custom data along with user identification. I've found their technical organization, documentation and setup guides to be pretty good.
- Using Evergage itself is pretty easy, it has lots of features like user segmentation which is dead simple to use on the account or user level.
- Creating simple in-app messaging is particularly easy to do.
- Getting user engagement is pretty easy through the use of the dashboards and other tabs
- In-app messaging can be complex and hard to use for novice users. It definitely has a learning curve to it. You really have to find the right person in your organization to own this responsibility like a savy young web 2.0 capable person. Bonus if that person understands CSS (but not necessary)
- Reporting - Evergage has some awesome data inside it and they give you very standard ways of viewing that data, but it's hard to get a single view that tells the broad story. You can do a lot of clicking to unearth details - which I'm glad it's there, but it feels a bit cumbersome. I'd like to see this improved.