Flair Fighter review for Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty
March 17, 2021
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.
