Infobip headquartered in London offers a CPaaS designed to bridge IT and Telecoms, powering enterprises with omnichannel communication and user authentication options for a global user base.
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Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
OpenMarket is well suited to support enterprise SMS at scale, with a wholesale and flexible solution. Their provisioning team is great in terms of response time, and support for their products is deeply rooted in industry and technological understanding of SMS. OpenMarket would not be well suited for small companies just starting to test the waters with SMS in a low barrier way.
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
OpenMarket does most things well. One thing they are missing is MMS capabilities on text enabled long numbers.
The portal for entering shortcode program briefs is kind of clunky, it would be nice is account managers took the Word document and imported it into the tool for clients.
Bringing back the option to see not only who is responding to a customers post, but actually seeing the response as they are typing it out. That was a neat feature to have.
It will timeout, which is a bit annoying sometimes but not a huge deal.
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
As a top tier aggregator, OpenMarket requires contracts to utilize their services, whereas other SaaS providers allow users to signup and start sending within a shorter amount of time. The benefit of using OpenMarket is the relationship, and the SLAs in availability they maintain. Other aggregators offer equal levels of service, so there are other shops in town selling the same thing with the same reliability.
Sparkcentral is in an excellent place - they are the only true stand-alone social media customer care platform. We also provide support through Oracle RightNow (Chat/email), but the social add-on for that appeared to be weak. Hootsuite works fine for small teams of low volume customer care, but for a dedicated social care platform, we could not find anything else worth considering
Providing customers the option to contact us via social media cuts costs for the company by lowering call in numbers and creating a more efficient way of assisting customers where they are.
Currently there is not an option to separate outside of business hours reporting for response time and within business hours. This can cause a pain point when reporting to other departments as it calculates a higher response time than the accurate one due to outside business hours.
