What do you like best about the product?

The front-end experience for our members is easy to navigate and the design allows us to create a strong visual identity to help guide their journey. Definitely recommend investing in professional services to help with the initial implementation but from there the management and moderation are intuitive for the team. Investment in the roadmap is also demonstrating that they are listening to what's important to their customers.

What do you dislike about the product?

These are more opportunities for future releases vs dislikes, as gamification could be enhanced to reward super-user contributions, continued improvements to out-of-the-box reporting, along with the ability to send out member digests from within the platform.

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

Creating a centralized hub for product knowledge/education and connecting our users to share their knowledge and learn from one another has been a massive WIN. And, we still have opportunities to continue to solve new problems and unlock more value for our business.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Should definitely be on your vendor shortlist and not surprised if they become your top contender....good luck!

What do you like best about the product?

The Insided platform is straightforward to edit, change, customize, but because it's a template, it means the latest improvements are available straight away. Their SEO infrastructure is awesome.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some elements of the site are more difficult to edit myself, I have to get help from Support. Most pages and areas are easy to change in seconds. The private message features also need improving.

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

Self-service of common long-tail queries via amazing SEO. Hosting discussions where there is meaningful engagement. Quality exchange of information vs shallow social media contact. Detailed guides made by and for customers that are easy to find online. Ideation is coming. Advocacy is a constant, with our brand volunteers flying the flag. .

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Get SSO, commit your business to the platform by hosting KB, ideation modules. Provide lots of onramps on your customer journey and all touchpoints. Position your forum so it's the best at what it does.

What do you like best about the product?

Awesome core features without the burden of bells and whistles. Many of the other platform providers believe customization is the answer. They are wrong. Customization means greater costs and resources to maintain and a higher likelihood of things breaking.

What do you dislike about the product?

This is a pet peeve and while it's not a deal breaker it does take away from the simplicity of the product. The dreaded "quote" feature in replies....

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

The business challenge is to operate with a lean Opex structure when it comes to supporting our customers. Over 90% of replies to questions come from customers helping customers making platform's ROI very respectable. In addition, early recognition of troubles (pattern monitoring) potentially affecting thousands of users, can be prevented by the insight our teams uncover.

What do you like best about the product?

Accessibility, support, the possibility to test in staging. Everything!

What do you dislike about the product?

The analytics data and Google Analytics don't always match.

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

We're providing our customers with information whenever they need it.

What do you like best about the product?

There's a lot to love about inSided as a product and as a company. Here are a few areas where I think inSided really shines:

Implementation & Administration
First and foremost, inSided is easy to set up and use. We were able to soft-launch only 6 weeks from our project kick-off, followed by a full launch almost exactly one month later. Throughout the project, inSided was incredibly responsive and there to help us every step of the way. The project was well-managed and well-organized, with a detailed project plan tracked in Asana that allowed our organizations to easily collaborate on tasks at hand and to share/access necessary resources. The system was easy to configure, and their OOTB integrations with Salesforce + Zendesk literally only took a matter of minutes for us to activate (if you ignore the additional custom work required on our end for the SFDC integration – more on that later).

Platform Functionality
Take a look at any community built on inSided, and you'll immediately recognize that the platform is built with the end-user in mind. The layout is clean and intuitive, and we hear from members all the time that our community is simply a joy to use. This is a community platform designed by individuals who understand the building blocks of successful communities and built to effectively support those building blocks. Discussion Categories, Knowledge Base Categories, Groups, Product Updates, Events, Ideas, Questions, Conversations, a feature-rich text editor for posts, User Profiles, Gamification, and a powerful WYSIWYG editor that controls page layout & phraseology are all features that allow the platform to scale incredibly efficiently. inSided's robust gamification structure allows you to custom-design your community to incentivize the right type of member behavior for your use case. They also have a lot of great OOTB widgets for their customizable pages that make it really easy to add value for your members and share dynamic content that keeps them coming back.

Reporting
I'd describe inSided's reporting functionality as simple yet effective. I'd like to see more options to filter and organize data, and for those options to be more consistent across different types of content (more to come on that later), but inSided makes it really easy to glean powerful insights from your members' engagement in your community, accompanied by some welcome visuals that are primed for quick screenshots to dump into reports for executives. They've definitely taken a "measure what matters" approach, not allowing you to report on EVERYTHING, but ensuring that what you can report on is what's most important. inSided has built a solid foundation for their reporting and I hope to see progress on this front moving forward.

Ongoing Support/Success Services
Our relationship with inSided can no doubt be described as a partnership. We feel heard and supported and have had no issues getting on the phone with the right people from inSided to help us with our problems. As a growing organization, it seems that their support resources/processes are catching up with the companies growth, but their support team is responsive and attentive to our needs. They drink their own champagne well, and their Inspired community is an awesome resource for me as a customer, though I wish they had more structured "formal" training on their product during onboarding. They set the standard for managing customer expectations when it comes to product ideas and innovation. They're incredibly active in their community and frequently communicate on issues/updates to the product in their community. They've been a huge help for us as we look to improve this same process for our own customers.

What do you dislike about the product?

Most of my dislikes about inSided come from the product itself, and most likely stem from them being a younger/smaller player in the space compared to their competition. There are a few areas of the product that I'd like to see improved sooner rather than later.

Search
While it's really helpful that they have an OOTB integration with Zendesk to surface Zendesk Guide content in our community search, I'd like to see inSided's search results add more value. The search algorithms seem to often leave out too many words or not focus on the right content within posts. It's not uncommon to search for an exact phrase that exists in the title or description of a post, only to have that post ranked 4th or 5th on the results page. Likewise, it's difficult for the user to understand why certain results populate over others. It'd be great for inSided to share what specifically matched in each recommended result compared to what was searched. This could help the learner more quickly find what they're looking for. The same feedback goes for the recommended content when users create a post or begin their search. Lastly, it's hard to tell when content is being recommended for it's title/description vs. text that is in the comments. It'd be great to see results segmenting by initial post vs. comments. inSided has thought of all of the right things in the design of their Search, they just need to improve the logic & algorithms used to populate the right results.

Salesforce Integration
Ahh SFDC integrations... They always bring about some serious headaches. The basic structure of inSided's integration makes a lot of sense, but I'm adding this one to the dislikes to again point out the room for improvement. They have a simple data model at the moment that consists of Community Members and Community Member Activities. While this data model supports much of the reporting organizations might need, it's fairly tedious to build exactly what you're looking for in Reports & Dashboards. Some fields are free text rather than picklists, which makes filtering/segmenting unintuitive. Additionally, some fields like Idea Status and tags aren't sent back to SFDC. Lastly, the integration is handled by scheduled batches, meaning records are created in batches and are never updated if/when info changes. This has created some obstacles when it comes to reporting on Ideas that may need to be addressed via custom builds (which, to inSided's credit, they fully support via Zapier). All-in-all, SFDC integrations are always tricky. I'm thankful that inSided has an integration, and there are a lot of basic insights like # of members, # of accounts, and # of specific activities per member & per account that we can easily and accurately report on. It's when you start to dig deeper that a few of the limitations start to become apparent. In my experience, that's almost always the case with these integrations, so it's something I'm happy to live with for now.

Groups
Groups are noticeably a newer feature in inSided. Private groups are difficult to manage since members have to request to join and there's no OOTB notification to notify admins of pending requests. Content in Public groups will display in the "recently active" feed for individuals who aren't a part of the group but won't let them reply until they join the group. There's no explanation of this limitation on the posts, which confuses members, leading to frequent reports of bugs in the platform. Lastly, there's a lack of custom permissions available to delegate to Community Managers/Moderators when it comes to Groups. With that said, Groups have enabled us to create multiple new-product beta groups, transforming the way we interact with our customers for new products and is opening the door for us to build "micro-communities" within our community.

User Profile Fields for Segmentation
inSided supports User Profile Fields, which I love. However, you can't easily use the values of these User Profile Fields to segment member experiences within the UI. Instead, you have to use technical workarounds to update Custom Roles based on certain User Profile Field values. This is a small issue since there's technically to accomplish what we need, but I'd love to see a native function within the UI that supports segmenting member experiences based on info they share with us (and/or that we bring over from Salesforce). Outside of this limitation, the User Profile Fields and Custom Roles are both super impactful.

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

Our Community has allowed us to build a "one-stop-shop" for our customers, which is exactly what they've been requesting. This encourages self-service and makes it easy for our customers to connect with one another, share best practices, and collaborate on solving challenges they have in common. It has also helped us consolidate our product communications and we continue to move more of our customer communications to our community. We've heard from our CXMs that they love being able to distribute a single link to a post in the community that can help answer dozens of customer questions, saving them time and increasing the value they can provide our customers. We're still working on figuring out how to use the community to deflect support tickets in the short term. We're measuring our progress on this front but haven't seen significant changes just yet. We'll get there!

For B2B SaaS orgs, a customer community is tablestakes. We've only been live for a few months, but have received great feedback from our customers so far and hope to see positive long-term impact on customer loyalty and retention.

What do you like best about the product?

[Just to be clear, I come from a previous company that delivered Online Communities for non-profits and associations. I am probably going to be more critical than most.]

I really enjoyed the onboarding process. There were good materials and I especially like the Asana board that was set up for us to visualize the tasks in front of us. I am now leveraging that same onboarding process in my current company. The Admin controls and Admin panel are very intuitive and modern-feeling IMO. It was easy to configure the product and get it set up quickly and deploy quickly. Of course, you have the added bonus of in-app contextual search into the InSided Community to get anwers quickly. Something you can leverage on your own SaaS platform as well. Great feature!

The flexibility to add HTML widgets on certain pages is an important feature and we utilize it often. If you haven't used the InSided data object to target content to specific pages or categories then you haven't lived. It has opened up even more flexibility for us.

What do you dislike about the product?

Just a couple of things. One hyper critical and one not so much.

- Driving engagement in your community is paramount as your work people up from registrants to active participants to super users who will often answer questions on your behalf. In order to do so, you have to find ways to prompt early adopters to participate more often. As it stands, you have to rely on users to opt into notifications or hope they start a conversation or reply to one in order to get notifications. There is also no way to send out daily or weekly digests. This is a huge failure, IMO, and I may have made a different decision on which platform I selected if I had known this was a gap. InSided should let Admins auto-subscribe users to notifications and then let people opt-out. For instance, everyone should be auto-subscribed to Product Updates. Based on user attributes, maybe I auto-subscribe them to a specific discussion category. Then allow users determine the frequency and let us style a digest that goes out once a week or daily.

- The analytics seem a little buggy for now but I do appreciate it. Can I get a graph of registrant / user growth. Right now I have to download the data and do some Excel magic to visualize growth. Small thing.

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

We wanted to democratize information across all of our 8,000+ customers. As it stood, only the top Customers got access to a Customer Success Manager. Smaller Customers didn't have a connection to Copper except for technical support and as such we were bleeding Customers along the long tail. We are a SaaS company and retention is king. Every Customer has a voice now. We have big plans now to extend the community for self-service onboarding.

We have had 5,000 unique visitors and 37,000 page views since inception (3 months). Our webinar registrations have increased 7x over that period as well.

What do you like best about the product?

The Insided platform is very easy to use for our needs, transparent, it offers us the functionalities we need. There are often innovations available that we are happy to use. The support that the team offers us is up to standard, for all the necessary advice and corrections.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing, we have everything we need for our needs.

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

To check for updates.

What do you like best about the product?

the communication between us and Insided. During the last couple of years, we built a great trustful relationship! The platform is very easy to manage and it has a great design!

What do you dislike about the product?

We already got the best of customer support, but I feel that we could also get the best of social media making easier to upload videos, play games, etc.

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

We attract so many views every month and our SEO is great. I noticed that having a community also bring us together as a company, not only bring us closer to users.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Check Deezer's communities and see how we manage to interact with so many users!

What do you like best about the product?

Their team. As a whole. From Product to Customer Success, from their HQ's office manager to their Marketing Department, from the CEO to their amazing support team. The people who are part of InSided makes the platform the best around. Everyone is dedicated to making your experience with them the best you can have. Everyone is committed to working with a smile and do their best.

As for the platform itself, the best thing I guess is the reliability, the simplicity in which it works, smoothly and seamless.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some features could offer a higher level of customisation.

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

The platform enables a great connection with our user base. It also helps us improve our product through their feedback, and it deflects contacts from our support team, maximising our customer care element.

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to use. Content on the Community is easy to find via Google.

What do you dislike about the product?

It is not easy to keep all content organized.

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

We try to bring together a fragmented community. Speed up content creation. Building a learning community. Stimulate community thinking.