Great tool for starters or for small organizations with fewer employees
August 11, 2017
Great tool for starters or for small organizations with fewer employees
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Sysomos Expian (legacy)
Overall Satisfaction with Sysomos Expion
Sysomos Expion was the first social media moderation & marketing tool that we used after creating the Community and Social Media teams. The social media team used the program to plan/schedule marketing posts, but my team and I used it for social moderation and monitoring. Expion is meant to address companies' needs for more streamlined planning/scheduling of social posts and for much greater ease with moderation than compared to trying to use native sites, particularly if your company or organization has multiple accounts on each platform.
- Expion was pretty customizable, though the tool we transitioned to has since made me realize how much more customizable other options can be. That said, Expion served us well and offered more customization than other tools we looked at.
- Expion's best asset, really, is its support staff. Our account rep and the support agents were always responsive and reacted with appropriate levels of urgency. Though a lot of the problems we experienced were due to API limitations, the things they COULD address were resolved with relative speed.
- I enjoyed the ability to approach our workload from either an inbox-style view or a more visual view with the workspaces and stacks. People with a more right-brained slant worked better in stacks than left-brained folks who seemed to appreciate the more linear, text-based style of the Single Stream moderation option.
- Reporting is Expion's weakest component. Please bear in mind that I'm not referring to marketing stats or page analytics. I'm talking more about productivity metrics for moderators and quality reports (viewing outbound messages for quality purposes). Expion WILL work with you to get you what you need, but building new reports takes a lot of time, and what you get back isn't always exactly what you're looking for. The tool we moved to has dynamic reporting options that *I* can modify on the spot, so whereas this downside was a tad annoying before, I've come to weight it a bit more heavily because now I see just what can be achieved when you don't have to wait for someone else to build dashboards and widgets for you.
- Locating additional posts from the same customer is a challenge. Although you can perform profile searches, viewing a complete history is frustrating. You can only see outbound messages in relation to each inbound message. The new tool we use allows for you to view the entire message thread all in one view, which is impossible in Expion.
- Expion does not update live. If you have multiple moderators working simultaneously, then it is WAAAAAAAAAAAY too easy to step on each other's toes unless you have people divvying up work and filtering by message type or platform or date ranges. For example, if we're both looking at the same list of messages on different computers and I respond to a message or mark it as read, then that does NOT change on your work list until/unless the workspace, stack, or stream refreshes. (The tool we use now is almost immediately updated with changes you've made.)
- This tool does not allow you to designate any kind of message properties for tracking purposes. This may not matter to companies with only one product line, but our company sells a massive catalog of products that extend across a wide variety of user markets. Being able to tag messages accordingly is a huge benefit, but it's one that Expion does not offer.
17 - When we were still using Expion, we had a total of approximately 17 users. 7 of those are Community Moderators (customer care and moderation) and the other 10 were social media associates and content creators (marketing).
- Expion had a great impact on our social moderation goals. As a new team, it was nice to be starting out with a tool that helped introduce us to moderation in a way that gave us flexibility and customization.
Sprinklr is definitely superior in function with one exception. Somehow, Expion allows us to moderate and manage third-party content, but Sprinklr doesn't. Aside from that, I'd say Sprinklr leads Expion in just about every other area, except support. Sprinklr's support has been frustrating to say the least. It's been getting better as they work closely with us to iron out the kinks and the miscommunications. But I never had that problem with Expion's staff.