Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty

I updated my review because I encountered a bug with the reviews file import. The text from emojis was not rendering correctly, and the support team wasn't very helpful. They suggested deleting the import and fixing the typo related to emoji encoding in the review content before re-importing the reviews. This response felt like a convenient way out, and I expected better assistance. I'm not willing to manually update the text because it didn't render correctly on Okendo, and I don't want to risk encountering other, potentially worse, bugs.

Support said: "You wanted to avoid deleting the import, so I won't suggest a solution that goes against your preference unless the team confirms it's the only option. The imports are the merchant's responsibility, so you need to review all the content to avoid issues."

But how am I supposed to review it properly if I can only see the errors after it's already been imported into Okendo? It's not the only option; it's just convenient for them to avoid taking action. They also mentioned that identifying the reasons behind these bugs is outside Okendo's scope.

___

I'm happy with my move to Okendo. If you're frustrated with Yotpo and its customer support like I was, you'll find life much better after migrating to Okendo. Shoutout to Juan for answering my questions and solving my problems. Okendo is not one of those companies that outsources customer support to the cheapest option at the expense of its customers. I highly recommend Okendo.

Good platform with a major flaw for our business: you can't pin the reviews to URLS, only to Product IDs, so if you have to archive a product to maintain historical data, but want to retain the SEO value for your URL slugs with an updated product, you lose all the reviews for that product.

I'm updating my review of Okendo after using it for about 7 months. I honestly don't recommend Okendo after the experience I had with their reviews app. I switched from Okendo about 2 months ago to a different reviews app and am able to make a proper review now. We found that Okendo didn't help us gain as many reviews as we hoped. And especially not many with images/videos. We were originally drawn to their ability to offer auto-generated coupon codes in exchange for review incentives. However a big limiting feature we found with Okendo was they only allow you to e-mail for a review request once. So if a customer never opens your review request email, or opens but doesn't take action. You cannot send another review request. You can only send reminder e-mails if you're in the $99/mth and up plans I believe. We've since switched to another reviews app that costs less and allows us to send up to 3 reminder emails with custom coupon codes. We've increased the rate of reviews we're gaining in the short period of two months time since switching away from Okendo. We also ran into an issue in December 2020 where our review request emails stopped sending for 2 weeks. We informed customer support at the beginning that it stopped working and they had no updates at all. It was only after we wrote a polite but negative review via e-mail did they then have someone work on fixing it right away. But this was 2 weeks later. If we hadn't continued to follow up and reaching out, it'd probably still be broken till today. I had the Essential $29/mth plan. I didn't receive any help with installing the app when the auto-installer didn't work. I had to spend about 2-3 days mucking about in the code of my theme to try to get it to work. When I asked for help, I was told that if I were to upgrade my plan to the $99/mth plan, then they could help me install their reviews app onto my store for me. I eventually figured it out myself, but this felt off from all the amazing reviews Okendo has in the app store. I'm guessing maybe other reviewers must have the higher priced plans? I felt like I was one of their less valued customers because I was paying for a $29/mth plan instead of $99/mth. The customer service also did not want to provide more information about best practices or advice for how to best utilize some of their features. For example such as what discounts or incentives would they advise we send out in exchange for asking for a review? They said they could only help give me more advice to this if I had a higher plan. The only positive aspect is that their customer service got a bit friendlier near the end and they uninstalled their code off of my theme when I was ready to leave. I wish Okendo all the best, and originally I believed in all the hype from all the 5-star reviews they had. Their onboarding sales call was really effective. They seem to really sell the idea you'll get lots of reviews and that they have an amazing incentive offering system and reviews setup which lets customers upload media. But we found all this didn't lead to that many more photo or video reviews. The biggest limiting factor is the inability to send any further emails following up with the customer to leave a review. Okendo is extremely strict that you are only allowed to send 1 email request per order in the Essential plan ($29/mth). In the end, I wished I had used a different reviews app. I think Okendo is pricy for the very limited features and support they offer. I also think that in late 2020 they switched over to having a VA answer most of the customer chat questions because the person answering the live chat would mostly take my messages and pass them on. They're polite but were unable to actually do anything to help or have much knowledge of the app. TLDR: There's other reviews apps out there that are better, have more features, and costs half the price of Okendo. I regret using Okendo when I think of how many potential email reviews I've lost out on during the time I was using Okendo.

I tried the app, signed up for 20$/month but couldn't use custom HTML templates so I uninstalled it. Then the customer service reached out to me and explained that there is a solution by integrating with Omnisend send. That app is another 16$/month, but fine, let's try it.

I installed Omnisend, then cannot find how to integrate it with Okendo, I reach out to the customer agent, who then tells me that this feature costs 300$. I replied that I won't spend that much just to be able to send emails, which should be a basic feature. The agent comes back to me questioning my reasons and wondering if I could just style my emails instead of using HTML template.

Please dont' waste your customers time, if you don't have a solution it's fine, but don't lure me into testing something to later find out it costs 15x more. Also don't question your customers need, it's better to miss a sale than to ridicule yourself like that.