Databox

What do you like best?

Everything I saw before starting to use it. The potential for a service like this is very appealing. The reality, however, is something else.

What do you dislike?

The service purports itself to be an easy solution for reporting and data analysis. The truth is that the setup and management or unstable, and difficult to set up. Many of the data sources are not set up for the data history that it carefully states as "up to" which means that you're sometimes getting weeks of data, which is technically "up to 11 months," but not practically usable.

Timely customer/tech support is non-existent. I've rarely gotten same-DAY service let alone live support.

When you are able to connect with a service person, I have found some to be evasive at best, defensive and argumentative at worst (due to then trying to support a service that doesn't offer much of the benefit they promote and the bait and switch service levels).

The bulk of features are in the top service tiers and the lower tiers are there to serve as bait for the bait and switch tactics (see note above about data sources). The pricing menu is missing key restrictions such as custom date ranges. If you want to find any true value from this service expect to pay for the business tier ($248/mo).

Even then, the data sources are not complete. There are missing data points and the data history is inconsistent from source to source.

My trial was frustrating but I thought I had it set up at a place where it would be usable for monthly reporting. I subscribed to the basic service and discovered the hidden restrictions and the lack of timely support caused me to present incomplete and inaccurate data at a month-end review.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Put the trial through its paces. Make sure you check all your data sources for metric availability and data history. You could find yourself with a data source that inexplicably doesn't include a metric, or your historical data starts when you sign up for Databox, not for as long as you've used the data source.

Unless you are using their top tier, you will be missing a lot of functionality.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

A quick way to collect and consistently visualize all of my different marketing data, and present it in an easy to understand way. It's easy to share and present the data, but getting there is not easy if you can get there at all.