Outstanding at the beginning but...
What do you like best?
The sales team from the beginning were just fantastic. We connected to ONE KEY PERSON who constantly asked us of updates and helped us really understand the platform. The non-tech-savvy marketers on our team were able to use it without the hassle and he was extremely helpful in all of our queries.
What do you dislike?
The platform has potential. There are two key services: Curation and Data Analysis. The CMP was supposed to be helpful when it comes to content marketing because it shows you how a content directly affects the sales. Very important metrics, as we all know, when it comes to content marketing.
We were hoping to get that integrated reporting on the CMP so we can provide extra incentives to both our marketing and sales teams, but the integration of the platform itself took a lot of tool in our planning and execution that we were paying for it for $12K per annum while nobody was using it.
Now, going to the billing, nobody has ever reached out to us to inform us that the contract is set to an end. They let us move forward on the next years locked in that contract. Yes, there may be an oversight on our team as well when it comes to making sure that our contract with them doesn't go on forever, but having someone from their team check in on us to make sure we were happy for our first year and what our plans are when it comes to continuing the service & partnership for the following year would've been appreciated.
However, because we didn't have innate connectivity in the third-party applications NEED (which we didn't know was a preprequisite to get the data they said we would have) like Marketo, Eloqua and/or Pardot, we barely used the platform.
Curata SHOULD REQUIRE users accounts on these third-party platforms BEFORE signing them on the CMP because aside from what's supposed to be an editorial/revision platform (that took them 1++ years to bring an update to), without the third-party applications, it doesn't really do much. It was a big disappointment especially since the CMP IS pricey. After the first year, we were wondering about the main purpose of the CMP for our team if we signed on with Pardot,for example, because the Salesforce platform will have all the data the CMP will provide. At the end of the day, the CMP shouldn't be advertised as a holistic content marketing platform but a reports consolidation platform. In our first year, they also changed our access that limits us into integrating more domains on our account, saying if we want to use the features that were initially available for us (admins) when we signed up, we WILL NEED TO UPGRADE.
Moreover, after one year, there has been a shift in their team. The one person who used to reach out to me constantly and help our team get on track, resigned and I was passed on two one person to another who didn't know what our goals/business are/is.
Just a month ago, I tried calling and emailing their team and the person I was passed onto CLAIMED he was the first person who spoke to me this year. Upon checking my email history, it was another sales person/account manager and his email is already deactivated. The current person I was in contact with can't even be bothered to call out during my team's business hours (we operate on different international timezones) and had a lazy, condesending tone during the two calls I've made with him.
This big team/management shift is affecting the entire relationship their first salesperson created with us. Their support team is no longer as reliable as two years ago and I don't like where their team is headed. It could be because of their growing success that hubris has gotten into their heads, but honestly, even with the CSS, there are alternatives in the market that can already provide what they're offering (whether it's at par with their pricing or not).
What's worse was that I received an email offer (as if I'm a new customer) offering me of an 80% lower offering than what our initial contract states. Nobody even bothered to reach out to my team to tell us that if we want, we can actually opt for the cheaper offering they had launched. We signed on during the early stages of Curata and it's disappointing to see this kind of relationship go on a downward spiral.
Because of this, we have terminated our contract with them. Spike and other platforms are better alternatives for Curata.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
The deployments of updates is SLOW. The company's knowledge of the content marketing industry is good, but the execution and interpretation of that to their understanding of marketers' needs is not evident in what they're doing.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Curation, research.
