What do you like best about the product?

Now that we've onboarded several BAU products with Insider, the following is working well.

Local support (AU)
- The AU team have been responsive and endeavoured to assist with challenges in getting assistance from overseas support when solutions aren't available locally. They available to meet frequently and have run useful workshops with the team here in our office to get the ball rolling in new product spaces.

UI
- This is mostly smooth and easy for non-tech users to engage with. Navigation between products is easy and the segmentation capabilities across channels is really useful.

Architect
- Is easy to use and provides strong A/B Testing capabilities through drag-and-drop functionality. Reporting is also insightful here, however we've found reporting across multiple versions of the same journey can be tricky.

Paid Media connectors
- These are easy to setup and enable, leveraging the segmentation capabilities easily. A build here would be to integrate settings that auto add/remove users from an audience without Architect Journeys

What do you dislike about the product?

We've had a number of challenges with Onboarding and scaling Insider quickly. Summary is as follows:

Overseas support (Non-AU)
- Core capabilities for products are overseas and it's hit and miss on which product gets responsive support. For example, Web SDK team were great and would answer questions overnight (AU-time) and hop on calls to solve. App SDK team struggled to support for AU, were rarely available and took a long time to respond.

Documentation / UI Functionality Inconsistencies
- Documentation seems often inaccurate / inconsistent - This lead to lost time investigating how the system actually works. For example, webSDK wizard and academy had different format of payloads for the same event or the fix for a deep linking issue wasn’t actually available in Insider Docs, but was instead stored in Google docs. We discussed a documentation audit and hopefully this happens soon.
- UI Functionality doesn't always work as expected and often requires back-end activation without notification/documentation of this. For example, the docs and system suggest that adding an Unsub number to mobile messaging settings will update which instance the unsubs will be recorded to. In reality, Insider’s team need to make this change on the back end.

Platform / Data Consistency
- We've had a number of platform inconsistencies which impact the data passing through from Data Sources and integration settings. This has resulted in data loss, opportunity loss in stalled campaigns and onboarding challenges, especially in the App (functionality would drop off randomly during integration). Monitoring of data feeds and pre-release announcements would really assist to mitigate here.

App SDK
- We like the functionality of the EXPO SDK but can't onboard it as it's not suitable for our App. It seems from the provided docs that the Expo SDK is intended for use with Expo-ejected apps, which ours is not. Ours relies on the central prebuild method which handles generating the native code (e.g. App Delegate files), which is why we can't just simply manually modify those files, and need a plugin to handle those kinds of changes. Ejection was fully deprecated back in August 2022, and so would not be an appropriate method for us going forward, if that is what is required to make the Expo SDK work. Without something like an Expo plugin to implement the missing features, it's likely it would only continue the same issues we are currently experiencing with the native SDK

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

By aligning our CDP with our Marketing Automation platform, we found greater speed to market with initiatives, especially when building and leveraging audiences. We have also aligned all of our Digi Direct Marketing channels into the same platform, which uplifts capabilities in frequency management, reporting and customer journeys.