Nowadays, all businesses are connected online with one another. Online interactions are the order of the day as even business deals are often finalized over chat room conversations. Online chats are often jumbled up and this is where the role of online tool “sameroom.io” comes into play. The tool works towards making chatroom interactions better and more fruitful.

Sameroom helps connect chatrooms across the globe, even though they are operating on completely different services. Founded by Peter Hizalev and Andrei Soroker in 2013, this tool is perfect to bring together all the different solutions to one platform for better interaction. The Sameroom software allows for combination between multiple chats on the same service. This combined chat can also be conducted across different platforms. Some of the platforms, which work with Sameroom include Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, Yammer, Twitter, Salesforce Chatter, Telegram, Spark, and HipChat among others.

Sameroom – Cloud based interface for better connectivity

With the help of Sameroom tool, users, both individuals and teams, can interact across different chatrooms, discussing multiple issues at the same time. This helps to save a lot of time and money on the part of the client. Sameroom has Tubes, which connects two teams. For people wanting multiple connections, Sameroom provides Portals that have a shareable URL. These URLs are used to create unlimited number of Tubes between many users. Sameroom tool has other working options also like Relay and Hush, which not only enable message archiving but also allow communication without message replication.

Some of the best features of Sameroom include:

• Users can connect across multiple chat rooms even while being on the same platform.
• Messages posted in one chat room can automatically be seen in the other.
• Has facility for creating networks reaching multiple chat rooms
• Works using different forms like Tubes, Portals, Relay and Hush. All of these are designed to suit different purposes.
• The Sameroom platform is mostly used by people in the software and engineering field, venture capitalists.
• Sameroom gives users options whether they want their user name be displayed with the posted messages. It gives them the option of being anonymous.
• Users can also decide if their team name will be posted with the messages in connected rooms.

How It Works

Suppose you have two teams who are on different chat stations. The messages cannot be shared as they are on different platforms. This is where the role of Sameroom becomes important.

1. Sameroom works by automatically creating an account for the user.
2. Thereafter, user needs to click on the option “Create a Portal” and then select a source from the drop down menu.
3. This generates a link, which can be sent to the other users.
4. After the link is sent, one can type the name of the channels that need to be connected.
5. You then come to the “Manage” page where you will see a diagram.
6. This diagram will grow every time you add to the conversation.
7. One can connect to many different platforms within the same conversation.
8. Different teams can make use of the same channel without leaving their own chat rooms.
9. One can also upload or download files easily using this platform.
10. Real time transfer and documentation becomes very easy with the help of Sameroom tool.

Pros

There are many upsides to using Sameroom:

• Better Connectivity: The biggest advantage of using the Sameroom tool is that it offers better connectivity between different users and there is better exchange of ideas and materials.
• Builds Customer Bridges: The Sameroom tool allows customers to build bridges and connections across and between different products.
• Connects Multiple Chatrooms: Another major advantage of the Sameroom tool is that it works with many chat products like HipChat, Campfire, IRC, Slack, Glip, Fleep, Gitter, Kato among others.

Cons

There aren’t any real cons except that it:

• Takes Time to Understand: While there are not many negatives about the Sameroom tool, some people may take time to negotiate how the tool works.

• Smooth integration across chatrooms, courtesy @sameroomHQ sameroom.io/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

The overall verdict about Sameroom tool is that it is a very user friendly tool and helps many customers get connections across chat rooms, thus building bridges and improving business connections. With the basic subscription costing just $49 per month, this is one tool that is well worth the investment in it. We give it a thumbs up!

Some of the leading organizations in the world spend millions trying to delight and retain customers. They try everything from offers to special programs to targeted marketing, but what they often overlook is the importance of the “personal touch”. An email in your customer’s inbox is personal to some level, but it is just that – a piece of written word the reader won’t take a second to send to the Trash. And with the amount of email marketing messages everyone gets these days that is exactly what is bound to happen to your marketing message.

So what’s the solution? A more personalized way of reaching out. And that is made possible with Bonjoro, the modern way to welcome your customers aboard or just say “thank you” through a personalized video message delivered to their inbox. Check it out.

Bonjoro – create the most endearing welcome or thank you videos for new customers

Bonjoro takes the concept of customer on-boarding to a new level. It lets you record and send personalized welcome videos to your customers making them feel more at home. It’s a great way to create a customer base that’s loyal since Bonjoro builds a heart-to-heart bridge between you and your customer.

And it’s not just about creating videos. You can connect Bonjoro to your existing CRM software to send automated messages to existing contacts thanking them for their continued support, thus ensuring that they’ll stick around for longer. Plus, you can add all sorts of edits to the videos you create like inserting call-to-action buttons at the end, custom messages, creating video thumbnails, etc. and it even lets you collaborate by inviting team members to join you on and start reaching out to customers. Trust us when we say this, Bonjoro is a simple yet brilliant way to make best-in class customer service a company-wide initiative.

Some of the best features of Bonjoro include:

• Uses the concept of video messaging to create and customize personalized videos for customer on-boarding
• Allows sending videos via email
• Allows assigning Bonjoros to other team members and lets them get notified when one gets assigned to them
• Includes analyzing feature for the number of Bonjoros opened, viewed, and more
• Enables users to insert calls-to-action at the end of the video message
• Integrates easily with existing CRM, email marketing, or social media
• Includes tracking feature for monitoring team results
• The tool is available as an app on Apple Store & Google Play

To read a complete list of Bonjoro’s features, visit this link.

How it works

Bonjoro basically works in 4 steps:

• Connect it with your existing CRM application to pull in contacts
• Record a video message and send it to your customers’ inbox
• Measure what impact your message had by tracking opens, view and click through-rates
• Add team members to make the entire thing a team-effort

To try out if this was indeed as simple as it sounded, we signed up with Bonjoro using the “Sign up for free” button on the home page. You could also use the “Start free trial” button on the main menu for this.

1. Just key-in your email address and pick a password. Click “Let’s go” and proceed.
2. At the next step you’ll be asked to make some basic changes to your profile since your customer will view it directly (literally). So here you can make improvements to your profile like add your picture, a company name, your title, etc. Click on “Confirm” when you’re done.
   Note: If you want to skip this step, just click on the ‘Skip’ button at the bottom right corner of the screen.
3. The next step is quite interesting. You’ll be asked to punch in your mobile number so that Bonjoro can SMS you its app with step-by-step instructions on how to record your first video. You could either do that or download the Bonjoro app from App Store or Google Play.
   Note: If you’re unsure about giving in your mobile number to a tool so early on, simply click on “Download it later” at the bottom and proceed.
4. That should do it. Now you’ll land up at your dashboard with a welcome message from Bonjoro and a helpful chat bot at the right prompting you to select your goal for creating Bonjoros. Depending upon the goal you select you’re sent tips for utilizing the tool in the best way. Click on “Get Started” on the welcome message to proceed.
5. The dashboard has the following components:
   1. To-Do: Options for you to pick depending upon what you wish to do first:
      1. Add a team member (this can be done by clicking on the ‘Add Someone’ button. You may add team members via email address, by uploading a spreadsheet containing contacts (max 50 in a free account), or by connecting Bonjoro to your existing CRM))
      2. Send a practice video to someone at Bonjoro. This is to familiarize yourself with creating your first video message and see how it looks. You can use this to improve on the background, sound, voice-tone, etc. and then create the final video to be sent to customers.
      3. Send a practice video to an email id you pick. You can key in your own id here to see how it will look to your customers.
         Note: Here you will be required to grant audio/video access permission to Bonjoro so that your video can be recorded.
   2. Results: This screen lets you see how your Bonjoros perform. You can track response times, view rates, and even conduct AB tests your personal on-boarding.
   3. Design: Here you can edit the Bonjoro you recorded by inserting a logo, custom background, and CTA. The free account doesn’t allow you to select Designs but if you upgrade your membership, you can choose from a variety of Bonjoro designs that you can use as templates for your future Bonjoros.
   4. Automation: This is where you can automate your process to save time by connecting Bonjoro to your existing CRM or use any other integrations like Zapier, Google, Mailchimp, etc. Adding integrations is very straightforward and the tool gives you detailed instructions for each step.
   5. Preferences: This section contains your account related settings that you can alter / update whenever needed.

Pros & Cons

Well the pros don’t need to be recounted; they’re just right there! Plus it’s very affordable. Check it out here.

Honestly, we couldn’t find much of any cons with the tool’s purpose or working. Just a few good to have things:

• You can’t track the results of your Bonjoros with a free account unless you create at least 15 Bonjoros.
• We did experience some technical glitches while recording our Bonjoros through a laptop even after granting the camera and microphone access. Don’t know at which end the problem was, but the mobile app operated just fine.
• The log out button should be clearly placed at a general spot like the top right corner of the screen instead of the “Preferences” tab.

• Create personalized video messages for customer onboarding and engagement using @bonjoroapp bonjoro.com via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

The real power of Bonjoro lies in its simplicity. Recording video messages with it is super easy and the impact you can achieve through it is massive. There’s nothing more a customer loves than being made feel special through a personal “welcome” or “thank you” message. It creates a human connection with your prospect thus laying the grounds for a long-lasting relationship. We loved the tool and give it a double thumbs-up.

We don’t need to tell you how important it is for vendors to communicate with their customers in ever engaging ways. We also don’t need to emphasize the criticality of understanding exactly what a potential customer is looking for when visiting your product website and presenting him with a range of choices from your services. But not every business can invest in a full-blown hundred (or so) member team to handle front-desk operations for their website. And frankly, the whole “people handling front-desk operations for online businesses” thing is just not tech-savvy enough.

Enter – intuitive, responsive, and engaging conversational chat bots!

Chat bots are the “in” thing currently being used to support and scale business teams in their relations with customers. They’re those little pop-ups that magically appear in the bottom left or right of the screen the very instant you land on a product site asking how they may assist you. While thousands of organizations out there are using chat bots to perform basic marketing tasks, only a few are doing it smartly with coding-less and amicable chat bots created with Tars. Let’s find out what makes Tars chat bots stand apart.

Tars – letting you create appealing conversational chat bots, without code

Tars is one of the coolest online chat-bot creators through which you can create custom chat bots without any coding. Bots created with this awesome tool can benefit you in 5 different ways:

• Provide engaging information about your products and services 24*7
• Converse with thousands of website visitors at the same time
• Save money by eliminating the need for people handling front-desk work
• Guarantee 100% customer satisfaction since users feel someone is actually talking to them, giving them all the answers they seek upfront, professionally, and quickly
• Automate repetitive tasks like email notifications, data export, responses, etc.
• Double-up as personal assistants for customers making them feel that they’re being paid special attention (and that can be critical for landing sales)

In the time and age where people don’t wish to waste even a second on things that don’t interest them or take too long, expecting them to fill up entire forms detailing their queries or requesting feedback is going to get you nowhere. But lively bots that appear to be real people asking the right questions quickly are sure to get the job done. Plus, they’re entertaining – at least you can make them so!

The best features of Tars you can use to your advantage include:

• Programming-less chat bot creation
• File / Image uploads of up to 5GB
• Support for uploading the chat-bot html to your own domain and use that instead of the Tars domain
• API integration
• Option to customize user’s conversational experience based on their responses
• Custom redirection to a thank you page, feedback page, homepage, etc
• Facility to receive partial data even if users don’t finish their conversation with your bot

Well then, shall we play around a bit?

This is how it rolls

A quick suggestion for this one: don’t jump straight into “Get Started for Free” with Tars. When you visit the tool’s website, scroll down to locate the interactive image of a mobile. This is actually a live demo of a bot created with Tars. Play with it, you’ll have fun!

Thereafter:

1. Click on the “Get Started for Free” button and create a new account
2. You’ll receive a welcome message through a – wait for it – chat bot! You may want to engage in a conversation with the bot detailing why you need the services of Tars bots and how they can help you better. Neat promotional strategy using their own product like that don’t you think?
3. Anyways, by now you should be redirected to your dashboard where you’ll see a large panel to create your first bot in the middle of the screen, and some helpful links in the left hand panel:
   1. Getting Started Guide
   2. Video Tutorials
   3. My Chatbots
   4. Settings
   5. Billing
      Note: Before you start, you could see some interesting examples of Chatbots for inspiration through a small link given at the bottom left corner of the screen.
4. To start creating your first bot, click on the “Create a bot” button. You’ll see a floating pop-up with a sample mobile screen and suggestive bot categories.
5. Pick the category of bot you wish to create from a list of readymade templates or create the bot from scratch. We picked the “Feedback bot” template.
6. The sample mobile screen livened up with suggestive questions about a feedback form for a pizza outlet. We clicked on “Use this template” to customize our bot.
7. Next, our dashboard transformed into specific options for the template we’d selected with a flow diagram (gambit) filled with sample questions which we could modify as per need and options to make, configure, design, and share the bot in the left hand panel.
8. Clicking on each node of the gambit opened up detailed options to customize it in any manner needed. Honestly, the work Tars creators had put into thinking everything through could be seen, and it was appreciable.
9. After making all changes, to see how the bot would look in action, click on the “Preview” button on the top right corner of the screen.
10. To deploy the bot on your website, click on the “Distribute / Share” button from the left hand panel and select the “Bot Widget” option. You’ll see the HTML code along with relevant instructions to place and use the bot widget on your website.

That’s it, you’re done!

• Create engaging, intuitive, and amicable chat bots without any coding with @hellotars.ai hellotars.com via @supermonitoring

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Evaluating Tars bots and verdict

At $49 a month, all the capabilities of Tars bots combined with the sales benefits they bring make this a tool worth trying out. A few good to have features that we spotted included more “humanly” responses to user inputs like an invalid email id or phone number. Some people might find it uncomfortable sharing their email ids and phone numbers to bots. Everything else about the tool was great. Thumbs up!

One of the most critical departments for any organization is sales and marketing, and the job of marketing managers and sales personnel is vital to a company’s success. Without qualified and competent sales and marketing teams, even the biggest names in business cannot succeed. Organizations typically spend thousands of dollars on hiring the right people for the job who can bring the right customers to the table in the expected numbers.

But that’s not where the story ends. Roping in new customers is a very challenging task and often, the best of sales tactics fail to work their charm. Advertising campaigns, online marketing, banner marketing, etc., do leave an impression on the potential buyer’s mind, but they seldom guarantee that a prospect will actually make an inquiry.

What if there was some way to ensure that a customer who is visiting your company website will actually call you up and place an inquiry? What if somehow, you could make sure one or more of your sales reps are connected to a probable buyer every time he visits your website? With CallPage, there is!

CallPage – Directly connect with potential customers within seconds

It won’t be wrong to say that CallPage is a sales tool. It is in fact a mechanism for organizations to engage their website visitors by providing immediate responses from sales representatives. When a potential customer visits a company’s website, he sees an interactive website button and pop-up widget that provide a free phone connection to one of the sales reps of the company. All the customer has to do is enter the phone number on which he’d like to be contacted and hit the button that says “Yes, call me right now!” Once a visitor sends in a request, CallPage comes into action and automatically connects them with an available rep from the company within 28 seconds.

CallPage helps commercial sites convert page views into inbound sales calls. It engages website visitors and helps to provide immediate responses through callbacks on real phone numbers. Organizations using this neat tool have claimed to experience up to 75% more calls, conversion, leads and deals.

One of the key ways in which CallPage engages potential customers is that since the connection is made within a short time-span of 28 seconds, before a user can decide to switch his browser page to another website, he receives a call from the sales rep of the website he is currently visiting. This keeps him glued to the page he is currently at. Even if he is inclined to leave, the sales rep can convince him to stay and browse more features and hopefully, make a sale.

Some of the key features of the tool include:

• Offers you to pick any catchy call-to-action button from a gallery of ready-made graphics or upload a custom graphic to help visitors spot the website’s chat window
• Automatically connects a potential customer with an available rep in 28 seconds
• Includes mobile and desktop support
• Enable you to customize the call-to-action widget with photos, colors, and backgrounds
• Includes feature to notify your potential customer if you’re out of office and offer him a free callback when you’re available
• Embedded with inbuilt analytics capabilities which allow you to see call history, your customers’ phone numbers, and other information
• You can even listen to call recordings and analyze your managers’ KPI and analyze the performance of each traffic source
• Easy integration with tons of popular tools like Slack, Shopify, PipeDrive, Salesforce, etc
• Includes support for computing how likely is a potential customer to buy something the next time he visits your website
• Capability to call customers dispersed across all major countries in the world

There are more features to this awesome tool. If you’d like to know about them please visit the tool’s homepage.

How it works

To start exploring CallPage, visit the tool’s homepage and click on the red button says “Start Free Trial”. This will lead you to a signup section where after filling in appropriate details, you’ll get directed to the dashboard. The fun begins here.

• The dashboard is divided into 2 main sections – a sidebar containing user options (calls, widgets, my team, billing, settings) and a main panel where your sales statistics resulting from CallPage will be displayed.
• The statistics typically include an overview of the number of visitors to your website, the number of calls that were requested, average call duration, and successful call rate.
• To install CallPage widget on your website, click on the ‘Widgets’ tab from the sidebar and click on the “Install Widget” button.
• This will direct you to the HTML code which you need to place on your website and appropriate instructions to do it.
• Once the widget is live on your website, you can customize it through convenient options. The customization screen can be opened by clicking on the edit button next to the panel dedicated to that particular widget.
  • Click on SMS settings to customize your messaging settings.
  • Click on Call settings to customize call settings.
  • While making customizations remember not to meddle with any application code for CallPage. This can lead to your widget not working.

Using the tool is actually not very difficult. There are plenty of customization options and everything is appropriately explained. You can also visit the tool’s resources to learn more and of course, there is a quick video to give you a tour to the tool too.

Pros VS Cons

Needless to say, CallPage has a lot of positive sides to it. It is easy to work with, easy to install on any website, customizable, and it actually works. Plus, the customer support is awesome.

But there are a few, albeit negligible drawbacks to it too. Though it is largely user friendly, users trying their hand at it for the first time can get a bit confused regarding the options and settings. Plus, the tool is actually quite steeply priced.

• Convert every page visit into a potential sale with a customized and catchy call-to-action widget – Try @callpage_io callpage.io/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

CallPage is a good sales boosting tool, but it is for the big players. At the price at which it comes, small players won’t be able to extract as many benefits as they will incur expenses. However if you’re up for it, after a little initial struggle with its panel, you’ll get the hang of it. And once you do, the tool can really help turn your sales figures around.

The corporate world is moving from physical to virtual offices. The days of going to office and attending important meetings are becoming fewer by the number. And why shouldn’t they be? With the increase in transport and logistics problems, everybody prefers to stay at home and finish their work from there. In the bargain, they save some precious travelling time. With this increasing trend, we hear more terms like work from home, freelancing, and so on.

While the problem of staying connected to the network is increasingly solved by better remote network solutions, the challenge lies in connecting with your clients. The audio/video toll-free bridges did solve the problem to some extent, but that was all they could do: share voice and video. The need urgently arose for more. Organizations were looking for not just interaction, but collaboration. People needed to not just see and hear but also share more data in real time.

The online market cottoned on to this need of the hour and a huge surge in the number of online collaboration tools and applications was witnessed. In the last few years, many such applications have been launched with their number still increasing.

With so many competent tools out there, how do you pick one? Well, we’re here to help! Today we bring to you the complete, tried-and-tested review of Bench. Read on to know if this online meeting platform can actually do what it claims: get shit done!

Benching with Bench

The highest selling point of Bench is that it works on a browser. That means you don’t have to worry about downloading the program, checking if it is compatible with your system, installing it, and encourage other people to download it. Just log on to your account in Bench and share the browser link with your meeting participants. It’s really that simple!

Think of the Bench as a physical work table that is used by all parties to work on and share what they are working on in real time. With Bench you can send text messages, make notes, share files, and even work on the files together as a team. And the best part of it all is that everything you do on the bench stays there unless you wish otherwise.

Let us take a look at some of the best features of Bench:

• No more dialing-in business. With Bench, all you need to do is share your browser link with your team and you are set to collaborate.
• Sending agendas on emails is in the past. You can make a note of things you wish to discuss with your team and share it with them before the meeting.
• Bench comes with a whiteboard, so if during the meeting you need to sketch something out or just showcase your creativity, you can use the whiteboard to shine. Of course, everybody can work on the whiteboard simultaneously; that’s what collaboration is, isn’t it?
• It allows you to share screenshots of single tabs, the whole desktop, whatever you need.
• The files you want to share with the rest of the team can be saved before the meeting starts. The tool gives you the facility of creating folders and saving all your files in them. The folder is accessible by all participants.

The audio quality of Bench is out of this world. Give it a try, you will really feel like you are all working on a single work bench. The tool is a fun to work with and ensures full participation of all parties in the conference.

How to work with Bench

There’s no installer program that comes with Bench; just a light-weight extension that can be installed on your browser. It takes no more than a few seconds. There is a demo available on the tool’s website that you can check out to learn about it quickly. It doesn’t need to sign up too!

To start using the tool you need to create an account. Click on “sign up” on the top right corner and punch in your credentials to do that. Once you create an account, Bench gives you a dashboard with your benches listed on it. You can click the New Bench button in the right navigation pane to create a new bench. The bench you create will be displayed within your dashboard. Click on it to open it.

After you open the bench, click the Invite to talk button in the left navigation pane to share the link of your meeting with everybody else. To share files with your team, click the Add files button in the right navigation pane. You can drag-and-drop files into the tool’s interface, click to browse, or upload them via online platforms like Dropbox.

To create notes that you need to focus on in your next meetings or just points you need to remember, click the Note button. Clicking the Whiteboard button opens a drawing space with all the required drawing tools you might need. They’re pretty basic but then, to present more complex ideas you’d be using a proper presentation tool, right? Other options include New Folder creation and Streaming and Screenshot that allow you to show your browser and desktop to the other participants LIVE.

To go back to your dashboard, click on “My Benches” on the top left.

Pros VS Cons

Key benefits of the tool include:

• The tool is free of cost so it’s ideal for freelancers and non-profit organizations. They have reasonably priced packages for teams as well as organizations.
• Bench really does a good job at making remote working stress-free since everything is done in real-time.
• The tool is completely collaboration-friendly; doesn’t need any installations.

Drawbacks include:

• The first time you use Bench, you might get a little confused with so many things happening at once. But since the learning curve is pretty low, everything starts to make sense really soon.
• We really wish it could work with mobile phones. While it does work on tablets, we are hoping mobile integration is somewhere on the roadmap.

• Make online collaboration fun, with Bench usebench.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Take

Other than the few obvious limitations, we absolutely love Bench. And we totally encourage you to give it a chance. In our opinion, Bench could be better than any other collaborating app there exists today in the market.

For any business, to ace success mastering customer support is essential. We often come across stories of how even after having great products and services, organizations aren’t able to reach the pinnacle they desire, all due to negligence in the customer support area. Believe us when we say, designing and delivering a great product is not the only thing that warranties success. You as a company need to be there to answer any and every question or concern your consumer may have. Agreed that it’s time taking and an often painful activity, but the results are totally worth the effort. And when you’ve got great tools like Sugester to assist you, why worry at all?

Sugester – Enhance your Customer Support Facility

Sugester is one of the simplest online applications available to help you provide better customer support, get new customers, and create an advanced ticket management system for your business. The tool serves as a one-stop helpdesk for you and your customers and helps keep both parties on the same page. With Sugester you can drastically cut down query response times by collecting and sorting through incoming messages, assign tasks to teams, and also monitor resolutions through a single interactive interface. With help materials posted online for 24 / 7 / 365 support, the tool makes sure you involve your team to resolve issues only when required. Also, it lets you monitor communication across various channels (email, phone, chat, and social media) at one place.

Sugester promises to help optimize your business communications by serving as a better formulized, specifically targeted, ever-present feedback and support platform. Some of the most appealing features of the tool include:

• A simple yet powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that allows you to maintain profiles of your key customers, keep records of interactions and financial history with them, maintain regular contact with them, generate funnel charts and more.
• You can add a “Sugester Live Chat” window to your website by pasting a simple code snippet into your site’s code. That’s all you need to start chatting with your customers right away. The chat feature lets you avail benefits such as customizing its look-and-feel, persistent sessions, searchable archives, etc.
• Sugester is ideal for your company if your support team shares a common email id (for ex. help@company.com). It makes sure all emails get answered and that too, by the most apt team member. This feature includes time tracking, analytics, activity tracking, response rating, and canned response creation facilities.
• The software makes you better at task and project management by enabling you to easily create and assign tasks, group them into projects (with attributes such as deadlines etc.) and measure how long they take to complete.
• Offers a WYSIWYG editor to write, format, and edit professional help content without any programming. Even lets you create pop-up tips and intranet knowledge base for all team members.
• Provides a manageable forum to serve as a sounding board for complaints, suggestions, ideas and more.
• Integrates with Plivo, Telecube and other prominent VoIP providers to let you make / receive calls from computers, track call statistics, monitor email and phone conversations, etc.
• Provides a host of emailing features to allow you to concentrate on your core product and services without having to worry about auto-responses, mailing lists, custom footers, group mailing, etc.

How does this work?

To start using Sugester you can sign up with your email and password or with your Facebook credentials. You will be provided with a URL where your Sugester program will be available. By default this URL will have your email id in it, but you can change it to anything you want. To proceed, click on “Go to Program”. Sign up might take a couple of seconds after which you’ll be directed to a “modules” page that shows all the features the tool has to offer. You can hover on any feature to highlight it and click to select.

We clicked on Live Chat which enabled it and then proceeded to chat settings by clicking on the settings icon on the top right of the ‘Live Chat’ option. It opened up a page from where we could click on a link to get the code snippet for a chat window for our website. On proceeding we were required to fill out our chat window requirements and save. Thereafter a unique live chat window code will be generated for your website which you can also test right within Sugester.

Next, we tried our hand at Knowledge Base creation. The process was similar to the one used in Live Chat. Click to enable, edit settings, and configure as per requirement. At any point, to go back to the “modules” page, simply click on the Sugester icon on the top left corner of the screen. You can also go to settings for profile, account, language, etc. by choosing an appropriate option from the menus displayed on the top right corner of the screen.

So how does it turn out?

In our trials, Sugester seemed to be a cool tool that simplified the setting up and configuration of solid customer support for any website. However, what we noticed was that while the process to enable features and tune them to our requirements is quite simple really, first time users would need to have a slight know-how of the tool before comfortably playing around. So there is a learning curve attached.

Other than that, we found Sugester very impressive. It is also quite affordable with plans ranging from free to max ($49 per month per account).

• Build better customer support with @sugester sugester.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Verdict

In this money hungry world, Sugester is a tool that attempts to truly help you out at a price you won’t mind paying. Thumbs up to the tool!

A key area of operation for any company is Marketing; so much so that in most organizations, you’ll find a dedicated department devoted to it. While it may seem to be just another operation that a company performs, it can be safely said that without effective marketing, a company can never think of progressing. And with the right kind of marketing, even the most impossible situations can be turned into a victory.

When it comes to a nicely planned and executed marketing strategy, a lot of platforms and campaigns are involved over and through which a company’s brand is sold to customers. Different techniques are implemented and a number of experts are consulted to make sure no stone is left unturned. Managing all personnel and processes involved can be challenging. But if you have the help of a little genie called SalesManago, you can ace the marketing game like a pro!

SalesManago – the best marketing solution for your company!

SalesManago is an online platform that combines the potential of a number of marketing tools into one application. Email marketing, Dynamic web content, Personalized web content, Social media marketing, Online advertising, Mobile marketing, you name it and they have an easy to implement, next generation solution for it that will help you achieve outstanding sales results. SalesManago offers a complete range of automated and personalized marketing products for Ecommerce, B2C and B2B companies of all sizes in a multichannel environment, with an aim to redefine the way traditional marketing tools are used.

All marketing tools implemented by SalesManago are powered by real-time flow of customer behavioral and transactional data so that users of the application can implement any kind of marketing process they desire. With over 6000 customers in 40 countries, SalesManago is one of the best and the most innovative marketing automation platforms across the globe.

Here are a few areas in which SalesManago can be of service:

• Identification of website visitors, identification of hardware/software used to reach your website, Geolocation information, etc
• Behavioral monitoring of identified website visitors
• Automating simple actions such as alerts regarding prospect buyers’ activity sent directly to sales team
• Ability to run fully automated, complex and advanced marketing campaigns with Workflows
• Email marketing including an in-depth knowledge of what customers visiting your website are looking for
• Mobile marketing automation by monitoring in-app behavior of particular users
• Social media marketing including sourcing new contacts as well as tracking social events on your media pages
• Customer Relationship Management and 360 degree customer view
• Web Push notification solutions to reach maximum number of users

These features are merely the tip of the iceberg. SalesManago bundles many other extremely useful tools that can help you create a solid marketing strategy and emerge as a true winner.

How to use SalesManago

The best way to get a hands-on experience of the tool without paying anything or signing up for a trial is through its Demo. All you need to do is punch in some basic information and enter the demo. If you do not want to leave your real credentials here, type in dummy details and it will still work (could be counted as negative but if they had a check here it would take away the purpose of a demo).

Once you enter the demonstration, you’ll see a lot of information on the screen that is refreshed almost every second to show you the latest inputs. You’ll get to see the total number of contacts your website database has, how many of them are monitored, how many messages have been left in the past 30 days, how many contacts are active, a real-time analysis of the page views generated by clients, prospects and partners, and individual customer / company behavior profiles.

Additionally you’ll be offered a number of wizards and creators to perform various marketing related activities such as personalized banners, workflows, dynamic content tests, email creators, etc. Also a host of marketing tools will be listed in the left hand panel to let you take charge of your mobile marketing, social media marketing, Ad remarketing, campaigns, automation processes, and more. In order to understand how you can actually use the tool, the following basic steps will come handy:

1. Add monitoring code to your website
2. Import your email contacts
3. Send email or newsletter to your database
4. Set up an alert if a contact from your database visits your webpage
5. Set up automatic contact’s segmentation based on what on your website interests them
6. Set up scoring for your contacts and get alerts about the hottest leads
7. Implement contact forms to automatically monitor each new contact from your database
8. Expand your client communication with personalized content on your page
9. Set up lead nurturing program to automatically educate new contacts in your database
10. Set up automatic marketing process or marketing campaign

To comprehend each of these steps in detail, click on the Get Started button on the top right corner of the screen and access the video tutorial associated with each step. If you like what you see and what the tool does for you, logout and sign up for a 30-day trial, this time with your actual credentials.

• Rule the marketing automation circle with @SALESmanago salesmanago.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Evaluation and Final Verdict

SalesManago is an affordable and useful tool, but it is undergoing a lot of improvements. Moreover, some of its features might not work as smoothly as you expect them to. Also, you might have to pay a little extra to get your hands on features like dynamic emails. However, if you are a little patient and probably a tad forgiving, the tool can be customized to suit your needs perfectly. Plus, it has a lot of integrations.

Thus, final verdict, it’s worth at least a demo run.

As an organization, what would you say is the most important step towards growth? The correct investment, the right workforce, market strategies? We believe the best way to get ahead is by knowing exactly what your customers want, when they want, and in what form they want. How would you know that, you think? Through a well constructed and well conducted survey, of course!

Online surveys have always been powerful tools for any business. They let organizations gain deep insight into the whims and fancies of their target consumer base. On the one hand they can help make a service better by collecting suggestions, on the other hand they can help find out the reason why a user doesn’t want to use the service anymore thereby bringing about improvements. So come to think of it, conducting a short helpful survey is all about benefits for the organization and for the customers. And Survicate is an online tool that helps you create concise and effective surveys that always hit the bull’s eye.

Survicate – The quickest way to collect customer feedback!

Survicate lets you gently survey your website visitors by conducting unobtrusive targeted surveys. It helps you to find out who your visitors are, what their needs are, and why they behave as they do. By making responding to surveys a matter of a tap or click, Survicate allows you to make surveys a natural part of your brand experience. With the help of this tool, you can safely get rid of guessing and base business decisions on actual customer responses.

Survicate enables you to create effective and attractive questionnaires that people actually don’t mind filling out. It allows you to send the survey / questionnaire links to customers via email, text, or social media. Through a unique Net Promoter Score (NPS) feature, in which users rate how likely they are to refer your product / service to others, this tool lets you analyze how your product / service ranks among your customer base. You can couple the results of the NPS exercise by following it up with questions to understand why users rate you the way they do. You can even analyze your NPS in real time to spot the most common problems your customers face, solve them and reduce churn.

Here are some of Survicate’s features that are worth looking into:

• Lets you create surveys containing single questions with text answers or multiple choice questions
• Lets you conduct surveys using Contact forms, Smiley face scales, and skip-logic
• Lets you display custom ‘Thank-you’ messages at the end of surveys
• Allows you to send survey invitations and target potential customers via Cookies
• Allows you to chart changes in customer responses by referring to their past answers
• Provides Reports and Analytics through CSV / XLS reports, Lead alerts, NPS analysis, etc
• Enables you to customize surveys with color schemes, custom CSS, animations, delays and redirects
• Offers robust security powered by daily backups, SSL certificate, and scalable infrastructure
• Integrates seamlessly with the most popular marketing applications without the need of special technical skills or 3rd party connectors

How can you use Survicate?

Visit the tool’s homepage and click on the button that says, “Sign Up Free”. A simple, no-credit card signing up later, you’ll come face to face with your tool dashboard. On the top right corner you’ll find an easy option to alter your account settings and view your current membership plan (and an option to upgrade if needed). On the top left corner you’ll find a drop-down listing the websites where you wish to post the surveys you create. You may add new domains by clicking on (+ Add new domain) from the drop-down.

To start creating your first survey, click on the large plus sign above the words “New Survey”. A pop-up dialog will appear with the following choices:

• Create New
  • Targeted Website Survey
  • Feedback Widget
  • Questionnaire
  • In-message Survey
  • Email NPS Survey
• Use surveys library

You could browse the surveys library to get an idea of how to create a good survey. The library has ample examples of Targeted Website Surveys, Full-page Questionnaires, and One-click Email Surveys / NPS to get you started.

If however, you choose to create a new survey, the options you will see next depends on which type of survey you want to create.

For Feedback Widget, you’ll directly see a pop-up asking you to fill up informational texts where required. After that you can select add-ons if any to include in your survey.

For the other types, you’ll be asked to enter a name for the survey and then proceed with adding type of questions, type of ‘Call to Action’, Design preferences if any, Appearance Settings, and finally, a button that activates the survey on your website.

The entire process is quite straightforward and easy to follow, really.

Pros VS Cons

It is after some time that we’ve come across a tool that has made it difficult to find cons with it. The pros are many, but the cons, well… not so much. Apart from a few more integrations we’d like to see supported by the too, there isn’t anything to complain about. Even the price is pocket-friendly.

• Get ahead of competition by tapping on customer feedback with @Survicate survicate.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

So do we have a winner? We think so! Survicate is a tool that can prove to be imperative to your business’s success. All you’ve got to do is know how to use it right. Create awesome surveys with it and keep monitoring the results for better chances of success.

People who work in teams understand the purpose and vitality of whiteboards. What looks like a simple, glossy, white surface actually solves the purpose of a thousand notebooks, scrap books, blueprints, maps, or any other term you might want to give to something that is used while planning and brainstorming for development. Today, you’d hardly find an organization that doesn’t use whiteboards in its discussion rooms. Even schools have made a switch from black and green boards to the more sleek white boards, and there’s a genuine reason behind the liking. Whiteboards are smoother, easier and quicker to clean, and can also be used as projector backgrounds. No wonder they’ve become so popular.

With technology taking people places, project teams have become distributed. People often make use of online tools to collaborate and share ideas. Even meetings are conducted through video conferencing. But then, how can whiteboards be carried around? Does that mean teams no longer have a tangible place to brainstorm and depict their ideas through flow diagrams?

Well, that’s where RealtimeBoard comes into picture.

RealtimeBoard – collaboration made simple!

RealtimeBoard is an online tool that plays the role of an infinite whiteboard. Just as whiteboard can be reused over and over again by erasing and rewriting on it, RealtimeBoard lets distributed teams brainstorm seamlessly. The platform is laced with simple sharing options and powerful collaboration features to provide seamless communication and boost productivity. Moreover, it allows users to keep everything they need on a daily basis at one place including post-it notes, images, videos, documents, diagrams, spreadsheets, Google Drive files and more.’

The makers of the tool work with the mantra – “a picture paints a thousand words”. If you ask us, RealtimeBoard lives up to that mantra in every single aspect.

Here are some of its most remarkable features:

• Easily customizable flexible workspace to jot down ideas, or build an entire project on the board
• Facilitates remote collaboration with teams scattered all around the world
• Uses an intuitive toolkit to create mockups and schemes, and leave feedback on your colleagues’ inputs
• Enables easy addition of files, images and documents from your computer and Google Drive
• Contains built-in collections and integrated libraries of icons, wireframes and other content ready to be used on your boards
• Includes cool templates that you can refer to draw ideas for your projects
• Allows you to share your whiteboard with your team and collaborate in real time
• Easy conversion of whiteboard into presentations using the Frames tool

Here’s how you can use RealtimeBoard

Visit the tool’s homepage and click on the blue button that says, “Start Collaborating Now”. You’ll be asked to sign up. Just punch in your name, work email and a password. Next, you’ll be asked to provide your official details, as in, team name, company size and a work phone. You can also start adding teammates immediately or leave that to later. A few more details later, you’ll be all set. If you wish to, you can watch a 2 minute video about how to use RealtimeBoard on the next screen. That will save you a lot of time of exploring the platform.

Post signup, you’ll have access to all premium features of the tool for 14 days. Once the trial period expires, you’ll have the choice to either downgrade your account to a basic one or pay to keep your premium features.

Once you’ve reached your board, you’ll see a grid layout depicting your whiteboard. On the left hand panel you’ll see a toolbar including various editing options – Insert Tool, Selection, Text Box, Sticky Note, Shape Drawing Tool, Pencil, Comment Box, Undo / Redo Button, Frames Tool (to create presentations from whiteboard), Full screen Toggle, Zoom In / Out Button. Go ahead, give the whiteboard a try, it’s quite simple really.

Once you have some ideas drawn or inserted or pasted (sticky notes) on the board, you can choose to export it as an image, PDF, download as backup, save to Google Drive, or attach to JIRA. To do this, click on the up arrow on the top left side of the screen next to your board’s name. Alternatively, you can invite teammates to edit the ideas or leave their comments. This can be done by clicking on the message icon on the bottom right corner of the screen. You can also share the board with other people by emailing them the link of the board. For this, click on the “Share” button on the upper right corner of the screen.

If you click on the home icon on the upper left corner of the screen, you’ll be redirected to your dashboard. Here, you can view all your different whiteboards and also keep monitoring the whiteboards other people have shared with you. This screen also displays some helpful examples of whiteboards fitting to different scenarios.

Pros VS Cons

RealtimeBoard proves to be quite an interesting brainstorming platform for distributed teams. It has a lot of pros associated with it which are evident from its feature description and usage. But there are a few drawbacks too.

• Deleting stuff on the board is tricky. You have to select the object to be deleted through the selecting pointer (arrow on the upper left corner of the toolbar), then right click to open a pop-up menu and then select delete. A simple erase button would’ve been more convenient.
• The tool is truly beneficial only for teams that have people located at different physical places. In house teams can be much quicker with actual whiteboards.
• The tool isn’t free of cost unlike the good old physical whiteboards.

• Take your whiteboard wherever you go, try @realtimeboard realtimeboard.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Verdict

Good tool, but only for those who wish to bring in a certain level of organization to their brainstorming sessions.

Collaboration is the key to success in the modern world. Be it technology, design, or business, teams need to share their ideas and brainstorm in order to come up with the perfect product or service. As such, there’s no dearth of great tools that can provide an optimum platform for the same. But in a market practically overloaded with online, free utilities for the purpose, picking a trustworthy and competent one could be difficult.

Not actually, if you’ve got us to help you out! As always, we’re reviewing another brilliant online platform in this article. The tool in focus today is join.me; quite a popular name among collaboration tools.

Join.me – Collaborate better, online!

If you work in a distributed team, a simple task such as a status meeting could mean having everyone connected through conference calls. Imagine the kind of technical aspects that would need to be taken care of if you needed to demonstrate a design or a POC (proof of concept) or functionality to your counterparts or clients sitting in another country. You’ll need equipment to establish a secure connection, voice and image sharing tools and often screen sharing tools too. What if you could have all of that through one platform that comes with two major advantages – it’s free of cost and it doesn’t need any installations.

Join.me makes this possible. It is an instant online meeting solution that makes team-work easier than ever before. Screen sharing, audio / video conferencing and collaboration in a few clicks; that’s how simple it really is. The success mantra behind this platform is that it is easy to start, join and manage. And if you’re a viewer (not an active participant) in the meeting, you don’t even need to install anything on your machine. Just log on to the portal and choose to “Join a meeting”.

Here’s a look at the most prominent features of join.me:

• The tool offers a new take on video conferencing. Called video bubbles, join.me facilitates light, floating visual images of you and other members. You can view live bubbles of one-another during meetings. You can even play with them (grab and bounce) if you’re bored!
• User provisioning, tight policy and permission control, single-sign on, and detailed reporting, join.me is one of the most secure online meeting solutions.
• It facilitates unlimited audio services using VoIP and dedicated conference lines in more than 40 countries. Includes audio conferencing by phone and Internet audio (VoIP) to enable you to see and hear everything in real time.
• Gives users the freedom to join meeting from any device (desktops, laptops, tablets, or Smartphone) thus empowering your workforce to be more productive while on the move.
• Allows you to record meetings so that you can refer to them later or share the recording with participants who missed them. To store recorded videos you’ll need a Pro account (5GB cloud storage) or an Enterprise account (5TB cloud storage).
• One-click scheduler lets you set up meetings in advance. You can also choose to setup join.me meetings directly in Outlook or Google Calendar.
• Swapping screens between presenters is super smooth too. One presenter can simply make any other participant the presenter so they can broadcast their screen with full control.
• Offers you the control to personalize the link to join a meeting.
• With join.me Pro account, you can add team members to make the whole experience more effective.

Ranked number 1 in speed and ease of use, join.me has up to 90% of the fortune 500 companies among its user base. The service is ideal for sales demos, idea generation, external presentations and ad hoc get-togethers.

Tool Usage

To start using join.me for free, click on “Log in” on the upper right corner of the screen. First time users can then sign up for an account with LogMeIn services (creators or join.me). Once your account is created, you’ll see a pop-up asking you to start your Pro account trial. If you’re not ready to start with that yet, there’s an option to “skip” this step for now. Following screens are related to the Pro account as well so you can just let them be.

To get a glimpse of the action, start hosting a meeting or join a meeting through a smaller pop-up window just below the Pro account one. If you host a meeting, you’ll get a one-time code that you can share via email with other participants. To join a meeting, enter the one-time code that someone else shared with you via email. If you choose to host a meeting, you’ll need to download and install the join.me app on your machine. The download will begin automatically and once it completes, open it and start sharing your screen.

Pros VS Cons

Do we really need to revisit the plus points? Well, if you insist!

• Instant screen sharing & video conferencing with VoIP
• Online meetings with unlimited audio conferencing and more features for less than $20 per user / month that’s billed annually
• Premium meetings with advanced management capabilities for less than $25 per user / month that’s billed annually
• Smooth working on a variety of devices
• Facility to record and save meetings
• One-click meeting scheduler
• Allows file transfer and presenter swapping

When it comes to pointing out the negative points of join.me they’re quite difficult to find. Except of course the fact that despite the claims of the tool to be number 1 in speed, the quality of the video or screen sharing will depend upon your internet connection speed.

• Communicate using instant screen sharing and web conferencing through @joinme join.me/ via @supermonitoring

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Summing it up

All in all, join.me is one of the best collaboration tools in the market today. It’s simple and straightforward; a tool that actually focuses more on work and less on talk. So get productive!