Marcom Portal Erfahrungen

Great Software. Less than great support

Kommentare: MarcomCentral has an incredible product they offer that is very complex. Some of these complexities go a little beyond what the basic user may understand, which can seem to make an easy task or simple template become tedious. While customization can be made with JavaScript knowledge, MarcomCentral very much limits the customizations possible, even with JavaScript. However, MarcomCentral has one of the better variable data Admin tools available as it offers a wide variety of field types, options and the ability to easily make changes.

Vorteile:

MarcomCentral makes it easy to create basic static product and variable products for users to create. Many settings are self explanatory and the Support Team at MarcomCentral controls a majority of the main settings before implementation.

Nachteile:

MarcomCentral Support controls a lot of the main settings. The support team is almost impossible to reach with emergencies and do not support JavaScript in templates, however they do provide a wizard to help create rules they do not support. Outside of MarcomCentral, there is a JavaScript related forum, but articles are very difficult to filter through and it seems the employees that help out with this do not get paid to do so, so it is completed in off hours.

MarcomCentral review for Capterra

Kommentare: We've had a wonderful experience from set-up, to launch, to support. We've never felt like we were on our own during any stage.

Vorteile:

This software has truly revolutionized how our sales department can access, customize, order and distribute our marketing material. Although it does still happen, having MarcomCentral has really cut back on the one-off requests that our team used to have to drop everything to address. The system is easy to use and maintain. And, when in doubt regarding anything, we know we have a wonderful support team that we can access at any time.

Nachteile:

The start up was a bit daunting. The MarcomCentral team was always upfront about the start-up and the amount of time it would/could take. We were ready to run when we actually had to slow down to a crawl until we got all the back end databases set-up. The team did make all of this much easier and stayed with us through every step until we got way more comfortable and tried everything on our own.

Front end experience is good, back end experience is clunky

Kommentare: I am the second person from Trimble Geospatial to work with the portal. There are about 4 Trimble divisions using MCC as individual portals. I started with the portal just over a year ago and had to come up to speed with it pretty quickly. I have managed to add a lot of content for our clients. In order to do this though I have experienced a lot of teething problems with the admin templates/limitations/customer service at times. I totally appreciate the customer service issues have been addressed now. I do struggle with the complete process as it is quite involved and we seem to push the limitations of the software quite a bit. Especially as I am now in the process of creating language versions and need the portal to support chinese/cyrillic fonts...as a start! There are two outstanding requests I have at the moment which I feel are quite important for flexibility. 1. I attended the MCC conference in San Diego, and met Douglas Cogan. Lovely guy...and we got chatting about the limitations of the graphics boxes, how it would be great if we could have angled ones instead of just a rectangle. I followed that when I got back to the office and sent him an email in March...have not heard from him since then. 2. Print file impositions. We have many documents that are 4-page / 8-page / 16-page or more, and currently the configurations only allow for single page bleed and crop. We think this is a very important "Fix" rather than an "Enhancement" of your portal. It is extremely important that a client can download a document...take it to his local vendor...and it is already in printer spread layout...for ease of printing, deadlines, and also cost for them. Unfortunately the portal as it is now...they can only download single pages with bleed and crops. So you can imagine if they have an 8 or 16 page brochure to take to a print vendor it would mean quite a cost for them to manipulate to printers spreads. Apart from that...I actually enjoy seeing the end results when the materials go live and I have had really good feedback from our clients that they now have marketing literature that they can customize and they are using the site :) regards
Jodie

Marcom Review

Kommentare: I think there is lot that I don't know and while our support team has helped us be successful, their support is more reactive than proactive in assisting me. I would like them to tell me what could be done up front rather than waiting for me to ask since I'm so new to the software.

Vorteile:

I think there is a lot of potential for the software but I'm still trying to clean up the products and understand how to set up the various product types.

Nachteile:

The admin portal is slow. I'm still learning how to create efficiencies of the portal but it appears that there are several things that have to be done manually and can't be done in bulk operations. The KnowledgeCenter articles are written for someone who is very familiar with the software rather than novice users (which I consider myself to be).

Marcom review

Kommentare: We have had nothing but great experiences with Marcom. This technology has helped us remove production time from the marketing department and allowing us to work on other projects instead. This self-serve tool has allowed our users to utilize the functionality at its fullest. The only issue we have come across is within the Business Intelligence system, which has had some hiccups that haven't allowed us to pull precise reporting. We have not been able to produce reports that can support the complete utilization. We believe once these are corrected we will have everything we need from Marcom and it's system. However, overall this system has been excellent for our company and has been accepted by the majority of our users.

Vorteile:

The customization capabilities overall.

Nachteile:

The low functionality of the rich text editor

Not as expected

Kommentare: We would love to fully integrate MarcomCentral into our company strategy in a variety of ways and use it across the organization in a variety of ways as the hub for all our collateral and promotional items. #rd party integration with vendors has been difficult, and content creation has been difficult and expensive, so it's been much more challenging than anticipated to actually roll out.

Vorteile:

The UX for end users is good. Once the software is setup, it's fairly easy to navigate and use. Has options to expand offerings.

Nachteile:

The setup has been a nightmare and not what was advertised in the sales process. Getting new content on the site takes much longer than anticipated and requires a lot of back and forth and in most cases professional services are required to implement, with a lot of oversight from our team.

Davey Review

Kommentare: We see the value of a storefront and have certainly appreciated this as our initial foray into a storefront. We'd love to see a stronger, clearer and more responsive service experience from [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] when things go wrong. They aren't available during the holidays and their service team isn't familiar enough with individual storefronts to accurately comment on them. We appreciate that the organization is launching new versions of the portal but find it challenging that the technology team isn't willing to have conversations about timelines regarding features that are important to our users. To us, the organization seems to have strict silos which impede their ability to deliver a quality service experience.

Vorteile:

We like that it has the ability for single sign on for our users.

Nachteile:

We find the functionality clunky (heavy reliance on flash) and find it challenging that the organization isn't in a position to help us adjust features based on user feedback.

Jim's Reveiw

Kommentare: MarcomCentral has really helped me streamline my whole inplant print experience. The automation it provides me on the back end, helps me produce work faster. The web based store front on the front end help the users quickly and easily place orders.

Vorteile:

First, ease of use for the end user. Second, I am able to set up separate catalogs/logins for each of the different departments that use the store. Third, the variable data/Fusion Pro templates really makes it easy to get personalized items out. Lastly, the way the billing is handled makes my administration end easier.

Nachteile:

I do not like the way the submit job is handled, especially at the billing end. I do not like there is not a button in the portal that say go to cart.

Built assets for a Marketing collatoral store

Kommentare: Providing Marketing Materials to associates and sales to sell our insurance products.

Vorteile:

You can add and edit multiple items with the Bulk Ops Feature. You can add many users at a time. Ease of use is a moderate level which is great for Business Analysts

Nachteile:

In the catalog editor, it would be helpful to have all the product in the catalog to have the Product ID display along with the Product Name instead of having to hover over each item individually to see the Prod ID. The Group Names don't automatically list in alphabetical order. you have to click on the Group Name header and was not prevalent how you had to sort them. I had to open a ticket.

For the most part, our experience using MarcomCentral has been positive, it's a great tool for us.

Vorteile:

After it's set up, it's pretty simple for people to customize their materials. The customer support has been very good and the site is continually being improved.

Nachteile:

There was a big learning curve, and you need the right people on your team to set up your portal. That was very frustrating in the beginning and was much harder to get going than expected.

Marcom Central

Kommentare: I love the team but we were over sold on the functionality of the product.

Vorteile:

Allows our stores to customize and print products with ease. Ultimately an one-stop shop for our users.

Nachteile:

Setting up templates and adding products is very time consuming and clunky. We have had lots of mistakes and issues with our Fishbowl enabled items.

Doesn't always deliver

Kommentare: It's cumbersome, choppy, not intuitive and clunky. There are too many steps to creat and save something. The developers promise one thing but when it comes out it doesn't work. Example: Social media. Integrations don't align with current vendor systems so they become worthless to us.

Vorteile:

I don't really like this software. It is not intuitive, there are to many steps to create and publish a product.

Nachteile:

It's cumbersome, choppy, not intuitive and clunky. There are too many steps to creat and save something. The developers promise one thing but when it comes out it doesn't work. Example: Social media. Integrations don't align with current vendor systems so they become worthless to us.

Review

Vorteile:

The team of people at Marcom are professional and nice to work with.

Nachteile:

There are a lot of steps to add products and it is not easy to navigate.

Collateral Distribution System

Kommentare: My company has used Marcom Central since May 2015. One of the main reasons we chose this system is its flexibility and "self-service" structure. My business needs require extremely quick turn arounds in terms of posting and/or updating the products/items we feature on Marcom. Their admin portal and web access allows me to address those needs wherever business finds me (office, remote, etc). My BRM Jessica has been fantastic to work with; responsive and timely. Keeping it real, my only constructive criticism is that some of the admin structure to update/create items is a bit clunky and does require an investment in time to learn. The admin user guide can be more user friendly and finally I wish the customer support team was larger so responses can be made more quickly. Many new features/functionality is coming in 2017 so I look forward to see how they play out.

Overall good on-demand product with a great business relationship team

Vorteile:

Lots of capabilities - far more than previous on-demand systems I have used. Good, trustworthy reporting system. Great relationship managers and team.

Nachteile:

Long lead times to get products programmed. Challenging to get edits or updates outside of strict FusionPro parameters.

FusionPro is clunky

Kommentare: Not sure it is worth the money right now that we spent on it.

Vorteile:

Was hoping to have this be very beneficial for our marketers, but they have had a lot of issues utilizing the platform, or even using it.

Nachteile:

FusionPro is not user friendly and very clunky to use. It is very time intensive to use and when Adobe updates Indesign you have to wait weeks to get the new software update, so you become a sitting duck.

Overall, it was good, with a few hiccups along the way.

Kommentare: The allowed much more flexibility for our users to customize their assets.

Vorteile:

The ease of use for the end users. Software support by customer service agent was very helpful and always made herself available to my team when we needed her.

Nachteile:

The admin side is much more technical than anticipated. Working with FusionPro seemed to be quite difficult for our designer. The training for use of the Admin site could probably be expanded to give a more indepth understanding of how to manage the app, especially considering the cost of training.

User-friendly with a lot of great features!

Kommentare: It's easy to set up, order, and purchase items! People love it!

Vorteile:

The thing I love most about this software is how easy it is to use. For someone not super-tech-savvy, it is so easy to set up products and display them in the catalog. It's user-friendly for our employees and customers too. They can easily navigate to whatever item they need without any issues!

Nachteile:

The thing I dislike the most is the way we have to set up groups. It's not as easy as I'd hoped. It's a "this way or nothing else works" kinda situation.

A great tool for sharing marketing assets.

Vorteile:

I like the possibility to switch between languages within one portal and be able to use the portal for more than one country.

Nachteile:

I do not think customers can choose the option to download and customize the same file - I've only seen either one or the other option next to a file; it would be great to have both possibilities/ two buttons (download and customize) next to a file (or perhaps I'm not aware that such an option exists).

Set up and implementation was pretty smooth

Kommentare: Ability for a large user base to order marketing materials and seamlessly connect with multiple vendors to execute.

Vorteile:

I like that it isn't limited and has numerous capabilities to integrate with other software and multiple vendor production capabilities.

Nachteile:

I'd like to see a smoother interface to configure new items and release them to production for user accessibility of order.

Marcom Central Is Helping Us Streamline Our Operations

Kommentare: As we're just getting our Marcom portal up and working, we don't have much real-world stories about it yet. But the Marcom team has been great in helping us decide what our portal should look and how it should function. We're in the process of populating it now with templates and digital assets. Once we open it to our associates, it should help streamline requests for "custom" collateral and take a load off of our Marketing team. The Marcom team in Solano Beach, CA were so warm and welcoming when I and a graphic designer from our ad agency attending training at their facility. We learned a lot and continue to grow as we gain experience creating new and innovative templates.

Very user friendly and helpful for organization.

Vorteile:

Makes organization simple and ability to track and share information is a plus. Web tools for learning the product are vast and helpful.

Nachteile:

Switching between 2 Smartsheets sometimes takes some time and you have to find your place again when you switch back and forth between sheets.

Great product for our sales team

Kommentare: MarCom Central has helped our marketing team cut down on the number of custom projects to support our sales staff and focus on larger campaign opportunities. The system for the users is very intuitive and our team took it quite quickly. On the backend for the administrator, it take a bit of getting used to but for simple products, upload is easy. The account management and support team are a great asset when you are working on a more complex product set.

Marcom for DaVita's Marketing on Demand

Kommentare: I think the features and functionality are good, but could expand on ease of use, and reporting from the back end. The value for money gets a lower rating because there were a lot of inconsistencies in hours quotes for us that caused a lot of stress and tension that could have been avoided with a set plan in advanced.

Great functionality, not intuitive enough from an admin point of view

Vorteile:

I have found its variability and scope to be broad which is obviously a good thing for a large business with varying needs.

Nachteile:

It is far too complicated and complex. It seems like there must be an easier way to store, display and edit information from an admin point of view. Some processes which should seemingly be simple (such as uploading documents and sorting them) are way too complex.