Umami Food Studio review for Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist +

March 7, 2023

(Update on March 2023) Since my review below, the team did a brilliant job recovering. I had numerous feedback emails on my initial communication on where it falls short and actually, the development team came up with improvements. With the added feature of a dedicated page to communicate how-to earn & spend mechanism, it became so easy to communicate loyalty programs to my customers. Still, room to improve but it's a feature-rich app with the best value. Thank you Alice and the team. (January 2023) Summary: (seemingly) solid products technically + thoughtful pricing scheme + mediocre setting experience --------- Still in the process of setting it up: which could have been done in a few days if supported properly, now extended over 10 days. Here is why i took 3 stars off. 1. For first-time loyalty program users, the tutorial videos are pretty useless. The video only covers, for example, "if you want to have a separate page on reward, pls put your custom domain here in this box and save". Then you come up with 10 different questions. -> Why do i need to make a separate page on rewards (to promote your loyalty program in an attractive neat manner, easier for customers to understand the whole overview and hence increase the participation rate) -> how to create a custom domain? -> where to create a custom domain (on Shopify? GoDaddy?) and on and on. You are on your own to find the answer to technical & fundamental questions (e.g. how to design a loyalty program, what's the best practice, what's the common mistakes, how to communicate this to your customers when launching, how to name your program and different tiers). I had to spend weeks reading everything from Smile.io's blogs and videos to learn all these. 2. Important disclaimer is not made upfront or communicated where should be (the setting panel of each component, not at the knowledge article). For example "multiplier" in a tier is affecting all points given in that tier (review, birthday points, referral... etc, while common sense says the points from the purchase). This is not explained explicitly so i had to design my loyalty program multiple times. 3. I don't know whether this is a January issue while people are on leave or permanent. but the long queue on the support is frustrating. and people are working in tick-box mode and you get different people giving you the very first answers you got from your first interaction (that very link from the knowledge page. which is not even thorough). So conversation going in circles and the to-do list is getting longer. You don't get precise answers for your "precise question" but they keep on sharing that how-to article (which i read about 10 times before contacting them) and move on. 4. Had 7-8 service agents who didn't know about their product features precisely and to detail. They all told me there is no option to give "points" for referrals to my customers (so my customers can accumulate their points in a more meaningful way). Spent another week shopping for a different app that can do this at a reasonable cost. Once I started to set it up, yes you can. Who is responsible for the lost time? I know I'm judging the book by its cover now because i haven't launched my program yet and gathered feedback from my customers. will update again. So far, very frustrating experience as the product is too good to ditch but the set-up process is just dragging.