The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Know Before You Buy Jive-x
September 29, 2017
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Know Before You Buy Jive-x
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Jive-x
We initially set up Jive-x to be our external support-deflection and customer education community. So, it pretty much touches all customers throughout the life cycle of the customer. The community was under User Assistance when I came on board two years ago. About six months ago, it was moved (as was I) to Product Marketing. Now we are adding a product blog to the platform to communicate with customers and potential customers about the company products. And it has some internal use, as well. I'm a real community evangelist. I have found ways to get other departments into the community and to get value from the spend on it. For example, HR is experimenting with using it to communicate with employees internally. And our Support team has a private space where support techs can suggest and vote on training. I also have several private spaces where we interact with Nintex Partners as we get feedback on software betas before we go to market. Some are for marketing viability, some are for feedback on the functionality of the product itself. We also have training materials in there for customers as well as product downloads. So, if you're a Nintex customer, you should be using the community no matter where you are in your experience with Nintex.
- Jive-x does ask and answer very well. It's a great platform to allow people to pose questions and to allow others to provide their thoughts very easily.
- Jive's internal search function is quite good. Google can tell you WHAT is inside the community. But if you use the internal search capability, you get context. For example, you will see that what you're looking for is an answered question or an unanswered question, or a blog post or a document. That's a big value and potential time-saver. Google can't tell you that.
- Jive is good at providing access to the JiveWorks community for community managers. I have many criticism of how that's organized, but at least it's there and searchable and has real value to help you figure out how to fix problems that arise. And problems will arise.
- Jive could do a better job of providing parity with its on-prem product in terms of features and in terms of making tiles on par with widgets. They basically quit developing for widgets and then stopped at a basic set of tiles.
- Jive has some good health metrics built in, but the reporting tools need to be way more robust. It shouldn't require an API call to get information on which pages have the most likes or which customers have the most followers, or that sort of data. And they need to make the views/pageviews match the way Google Analytics reports them so it's honest data.
- They need to improve the Data Export Service, which is opaque, klunky and hard to use. If CMs are required to use it to get important metrics, it needs to be MUCH easier, less time consuming.
- Just on support-case deflection alone, I estimate we save a couple million dollars. That's an estimate, but if even a small fraction of the people who view correct answers do not file a support ticket, then we've saved a lot of money.
- I can't point to a direct number, but because customers can get product download access in our community, it saves employee time/effort providing that individually.
- It's created a link between our sales people via their blogs, saving them time in answering the same questions over and over again. It helps close sales when we can point to customer success content and features and capabilities content.
For the money, it just happens to fit best with our original use case. Now that it's been sold to Aurea, which essentially halted any support or dev for the product before selling it off to Lithium, we will have to eventually move off of it (this assumes Lithium won't hire devs for code they didn't build, and that's not a bad assumption). So, while I recommend it, it's with the caveat that it's been sold and will be evolving in the near future.