Gainsight Customer Communities is a centralized destination that brings customers, resources, and products together. The hub helps users to engage, retain, and delight customers by unifying customer resources, leveraging dynamic search and AI capabilities, building an influential user community.
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SchoolMessenger
Score 2.1 out of 10
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SchoolMessenger is a school community software featuring secure email, social media monitoring, school website, and mobile app. In late 2023 it was acquired by PowerSchool, and is now a PowerSchool product.
A great scenario that we use the community for is product adoption. That's one of the things we use it for. So sending our new customers as part of their onboarding flow to the community to learn from others and see the resources that are available and know that there's a place for them to ask questions and get their questions answered. That's probably one of our primary use cases and scenarios that it works straight in. I can't really think of something that it wouldn't work good for. That's a tough one to think of on the spot.
SchoolMessenger used to be a good product for home to school communication. However, if it can't properly integrate with big name, run of the mill student information systems, they really have no business being recommended or used by school districts. Allowing data to be released to parents about other students and parents is what every school district needs to protect against. Would not recommend them for any communication that needs to integrate with any other systems. There are plenty of other competitors out there who provide more responsive customer service and support.
Cost is significant. Not unreasonable, to lower price would be great.
Support is very, very slow to respond. Unless you call in it takes several days to receive a response. I've had tickets open for over a week to resolve the issue.
I'd give it a nine because there are some aspects of it that we've had to, we've tried to find workarounds for, but there was no alternative but to involve engineering support and rely on custom development to make it work how we needed to
SchoolMessenger serves our main purpose of sending out emergency notifications and notices to parents. It is great to cut down on the paper use and the ability to attach documents to our notes. We have used this to send home notifications from our Parent-Teacher Organization. Parents have thanked us for sending a back ups due to papers being misplaced and knowing that they have a backup through email.
Overall, this is a good, effective, and cost-efficient product. It is missing some key functionality we had with a previous program which limits my total score, but I still think a lot of school districts can get a lot out of SchoolMessenger. The features and functions they do include work well.
The support is fantastic. I have never had such complete support from a technology service. Every issue has been resolved while I was on the phone. I never had to wait for a callback or an advanced support tech. Their people are very well trained in their product and how to meet their customer's needs.
Gainsight was the best combination of features, service, and price. HL/Vanilla ultimately did not impress, and Khoros was more effort than our small team could manage
We went from Final Site to SchoolMessenger. Final Site had a lot of customization with so much functionality and a real professional look and feel. Unfortunately, the cost set us on a new path, which led us to SchoolMessenger. SchoolMessenger packages a lot of the services we need in one, but it is missing core elements of design that Final Site offered us.
We've had a ton of positive direct customer feedback with regards to the Communities; a lot of them are very happy with the implementation and features it provides.
We have lots of customer interactions with both our colleagues as well as other customers and that has shown to lower support outreach in cases where customers normally would have opened support tickets.
SchoolMessenger is an excellent tool that links the school admin with the parents directly, which avoids the risks of students not delivering the message.
Saves money and time not being held hostage by the US postal service.
