All Around a Terrible Experience
What do you like best?
There really isn't too many thing that comes to mind at this point. What the user ultimately sees is pretty clean.
What do you dislike?
First and foremost, that the sales team was extremely misleading on multiple fronts. So much so, that everything a competitor of theirs warned me about, that they assured me wasn't an issue has happened. Let's just run down the list, this will take some time...
1. G-Drive "Sync": They will claim that they have a G-Drive "Sync" that will automatically add you content into the Showpad platform. This is a half truth. They do have the ability to pull in content from G-Drive, what they do not openly tell you, or at least didn't tell me, is that they convert it to Powerpoint and then load it into their platform. Which wouldn't be a huge issue...if Microsoft Powerpoint did have different font styles the Google Slides where we create all the content. This meant that all of the font's defaulted to Arial on conversion. After weeks their engineering team said there was no fix and it has now been 4 months and we have no solution. If you a G-Suite shop and use it for content create, be hesitant with these guys.
2. Bugs: This is easily the most buggy platform I have ever experienced in my life. Think of any of the core functionality and we experienced a bug with it. Whether it was loading content, losing content because the platform would randomly time out, not being able to add employees to the courses we created, the frustrations never ended. We have had bugs with video content showing up in previews of the course but not being able to be played when its live. I highly recommend not using them for this.
3. Poor CSM Support: I'll provide only one example here, our CSM was on an email chain with one of their technical engineers where we were discussing the continued issues we were having with the platform for over 3 months now. The CSM thought it was a good time to bring up we have a few more users in the platform than we were licensed for and asked us our thoughts on discussing getting them added, ie giving them more money. Super tone deaf. His response was essentially that he was sorry he didn't know we were having issues, he wasn't on all the calls and he looks forward to us being fully handed over to him. He made no attempt to even acknowledge the frustration or help us achieve some type of resolution. THIS IS THEIR CUSTOMER SUCCESS PERSON. He has also been consistently at least 5-10 minutes late for all the calls he was a part of
4. Poor Admin Interface: Good luck being an admin in here. The backend interface is clunky and difficult to navigate, it evident that they have grown this side of the businesses through acquisition and just slapped together something they thought was passible. Getting people into courses/paths is a arduous task, even more difficult to manage long term if you have a large team.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
DO NOT. I repeat DO NOT. Or be tremendously careful with your evaluation, we thought that we were and we should have done more backdoor reference checks with uses.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We've created quite a few additional admin headaches. We were hopping to provide a place to house all our content and onboarding material for internal employees and partners.
