SimplyCast

Love it and I highly recommend the software.

We used Simplycast for around 4 years and it was torture from start to finish. Firstly the interface is clumsy and clunky. even when you do manage to work around the frequent screw ups it produces, it often just junks your entire email campaign with no way to recover it. You can spend hours trying to figure out ways of getting the GUI to actually render something that approaches what you're trying to achieve and then you find out after testing that it simply doesn't work. On other occasions you'd make one small change to a layout and it would break everything else you'd spent hours trying to get right.

On one occasion I discovered that the email we'd composed missed out huge chunks when sent to an Outlook mail client. I contacted support to be blithely told that their system doesn't support Outlook, even though it's the single most popular email client on the planet!

The final straw was when I scheduled an important campaign to run a week or so before Black Friday. After realizing it hadn't gone out I again contacted support to be told they were having 'issues' (a familiar story from Simplycast). Not only had the campaign not gone out, it was stuck in their mail queue meaning I couldn't send anything else out. After several days of this, we gave up and signed up with a different company.

After explaining all this to their support guy he offered to refund us back the outstanding credits on the account. Another 3 months went by and we never received the refund or even any contact from them. When I called them I'd get another litany of excuses about the finance department having 'issues'. Finally, I was told they'd basically changed their minds and weren't going to give us the refund after all. Although they never bothered to tell me any of this as they were apparently not able to email or call me. That's from a company who are supposed to be communications experts.

The only reason we had such a large credit on the account was that their pricing information was misleading in the first place which led to us racking up huge bills on an account we rarely used. They offered a 'roll over' service on unused credits for an extra $ a month. But somehow this meant we still paid for the rolled over credits every month. A small bill of around $16 a month ballooned to around $ a month before we realised what was happening. After complaining they agreed to convert the outstanding credits to pre-paid and we assumed we'd eventually use them up. But as each email campaign was so difficult to launch we rarely bothered. The $ refund wasn't even close to what we'd lost during this fiasco but it was a historical debt so I accepted the offer as a good will gesture. Although ultimatley even that was screwed up!

The whole experience with Simplycast is appalling from beginning to end. From their terrible system, to their laughable customer care department. We moved to another service and it's like night and day. Everything works, it takes around and hour to set up and test a campaign (as opposed to a couple of days with Simplycast) and we're also seeing massive increases in our opening ratios. Something like 10-12% as opposed to 3-5% with Simplycast. So its not just an awful experience for you as the user, your customers don't see half of the messages you pay for anyway!

Basically avoid them like the plague and check out one of the plethora of much better run and much more responsive services out there.

When I ran my first email campaign I was able to see live metrics as people were opening mail messages. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm really excited to use the new teleconference tool for a meeting with around 60 people!

It was not a good experience. There are other simpler tools that do the same job. Simplycast has a great idea but I think it needs to work more on its interface and improve the reliability of the tool.

Simplycast is supposed to offer 2000 contacts per month for free. But when trying this offer in March 2013 I setup 2 email campaigns to be sent using a total of 1650 contacts between them.

The first campaign was sent but the second was held back with an error status. When contacting support their response was that I had exceeded the monthly quota.

I proceeded to explain to them that this was not possible as I had only used 1650 contacts in total for the 2 campaigns. They simply responded again with some blurb about how only 2000 contacts per month are allowed on my current plan and I should upgrade to send to more contacts.

Quite clearly the support staff had not read my complaint or they failed to understand the very simple mathematics of the problem. They seemed to have very little interest in the fact that their system had not worked correctly and rather than investigate the problem and offer a solution, their response was to ignore it and reply to a question that was not even asked. It is a bit like going to the shops for a pint of milk and coming back with a pot plant - completely irrelevant to the requirements.

Of course, this may not be the stupidity that on the surface it appears to be. A cynic could point out that it may not be a system error but a well designed ploy to get any users on the free plan to upgrade, at a cost, to a higher plan with more contacts.

Either way, the fact remains that a teenager could quite easily work out the mathematics of this issue and very quickly come to the conclusion that something is awry. It is quite telling that the support staff at Simplycast were unable, or unwilling, to do this and instead replied with canned responses which are, at best, of little help to anyone and, at worst, a ploy so transparent a child could see through it.

Simplcast should be avoided at all costs.