Fuel Cycle Reviews

Pros

The back end is very robust and intuitive. It can do a lot of different activity types depending on objectives. The navigation around back end makes sense even for the non tech savvy on how to do something like create an activity card to your community to react to. I also like the dynamic user groups and the email builder. The app is also pretty nice and easy for users to use. The email builder is VERY good on making your emails look however you need them to look. Also, the FUEL CYCLE team are very knowledgeable and helpful. Both [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] are great resources to help you when you have questions or challenges.

Cons

Having an online community that awards points redeemable for digital gift cards via the GiftBit API is the weakest aspect of the FUEL CYCLE community administration experience. The redemption process for a user will frequently go sideways on you either by fault of user error or on fault of the GiftBit API or GiftBit's emailer. This experience can cause member attrition as well as create extra time spent by you (and dollars) to make things right with those members who don't redeem properly, don't receive their claim code email or generally don't understand how it all works. You gotta make sure you take care of your members properly. I've had experience with Tango Card's API connected to an online community with significantly fewer issues.

The 2nd weakest aspect is the survey platform tools that integrate with FUEL CYCLE. SurveyGizmo is free CPCs but that's because its so limited and incapable of performing anything more complicated than a quick poll or simple survey. Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey aren't that much better. In future, I hope to see FUEL CYCLE EXCHANGE get some better survey platform options like Decipher or ConfirmIt. For an administrator that wants to run lots of complex surveys with routing, with quotas, etc, the current options aren't great for that. This is why I feel the platform is best for an end user client and not a research agency and not a third-party consultant. Its a fine tool but best wielded by someone at the brand closer to research objectives.

Alternatives Considered

CMNTY Platform

Reasons for Switching to Fuel Cycle

FUEL CYCLE's onboarding and hands on approach -combined with their flexible and attractive platform- is why they were chosen. Also, they were chosen for providing a niche offering that many others don't which is "building an online community for someone else to administer" so there are not a lot of competitors who do the same thing for our use case. We found other providers in the search to be lacking in the features needed for a research community and thus we would have had to change alot of how we'd typically run a project. I believe our client who owned the panel was also already familiar with the FUEL CYCLE name.

Pros

Fuel Cycle is easy to use and allows for a wide range of research methods. Some of the tools are built and managed by FC but at the same time they bring in fabulous partners that give me as a researcher a single place to go to execute a wide range of studies

Cons

The learning curve was a bit steep but the company has reacted to feedback and recently has begun to add templated activities that simplify the way in which you interact with members of your panel. These improvements will make it easier to use and simplier to learn if new to the tool

Alternatives Considered

XM for Customer Experience

Reasons for Switching to Fuel Cycle

I liked their philosophy of being a hub that brings in partners that have unique expertise. Pricing was on par or better than others

Pros

I love that we can manage our community easily from one place. It really does allow us to manage over 15,000 people with ease.

Cons

The needing to launch a number of different plugins to get the job done can be tasking. I wish it was able to launch WITHIN the platform, rather than taking me outside of it.

Pros

Having our members in one platform. Love the integration of Qualtrics to make programming easier. I like the incentives and being able to give points.

Cons

Launching an activity seems to be difficult. You have to import the link, set up the activity + set up the communication email.

Pros

I appreciate that I can field a lot of different types of survey questions and can do some fairly sophisticated data analyses.

Cons

The software can be buggy more than it probably should be. That, and existing analyses of Qualitative data is pretty much useless.

Pros

Fuel Cycle has done a great job of creating a platform that puts the customer at the front of your work and minimizes the monotonous work that goes hand-in-hand with research. Allowing us to focus on crafting though provoking questions to better inform organizational insight gaps have allowed us to make a bigger impact, efficiently. I also love the rich profile data points you can capture on members for richer data like appending audience segmentation to!

Cons

More and more, our organization requests new and innovative qualitative methods, we love Fuel Cycle's video platform, but expanding the toolset in this area within the platform would be highly valued!

Pros

I love how easy it is to post content, surveys, and quick polls to keep our audiences engaged with our brands and generate insights quickly.

Cons

Some of the glitches that we report seem to get referred but never fixed or at least we don't get any further feedback.

Pros

The amount of tools and resources that Fuel Cycle offers to conduct reserach with customer panels is what sets them apart in my opinion. You can do essentailly anything you can dream up within their platform, and their wonderful customer support and assistance makes sure you know how to follow through with that.

Cons

There was a slight learning curve in getting familiar with the software, but that's just due to the amount of capibilities and features available, which ultimately I see as a positive.

Pros

The FC team was very helpful in training us and getting us up to speed on using the platform. It's easy to use and has been valuable in understanding perceptions & behaviors and testing ideas. Our team easily gathers ongoing feedback via quantitative and qualitative approaches. The connection to Qualtrics is critical for my team and an an awesome feature, too. FC Live has been key to gathering qualitative feedback from participants across locations, companies, industries, etc. - especially during COVID-19 where online research is key vs. in-person.

Cons

Setting up and using the qualitative piece and related anlaytics platform for FC Live was definitely a learning process, but I guess I'm newish to the FC tools!

Pros

It's super intuitive, so even team members with no community experience can quickly learn their way around the back end. Plus, everything is in one place, including push notifications and email campaigns, making communication seamless. The FC team is always responsive and ready to jump in and help anytime they are needed, and they are great at staying in touch with us and making us aware of all updates. I love working with FC!

Cons

I honestly don't have any complaints right now. After working on multiple platforms, FC is my favorite!

Pros

- Helped our team cultivate customers who could give honest feedback
- Helps us stay engaged with our community
- Customer services is awesome, very personal and customized

Cons

- Licenses can be limiting - hard to show multiple people results, hard to get logins
- Not able to link customer IDs to our software

Pros

I recently joined the team (August'21) and was able to be up and running with this software in a matter of days! Very user-friendly and easy to navigate

Cons

The support messages under the comm center: once you open, these messages disappear and can be hard to retrace. Would love a "mark as unread" feature!

Pros

I love the P2 engine and being able to slice and dice to my heart's content.

Cons

I find it difficult to navigate the site and find what I am looking for. Each time I kind of have to poke around.

Pros

Fuel Cycle has been extremely helpful and responsive as a partner. They are quick to jump in and find the best solutions for us. They have built a strong foundation of trust with our team and we know we can count on them!

Cons

Initially some aspects of the software were clunky and not as intuitive as we would have liked, but the Fuel Cycle team is continually making improvements and some recent updates have made the setup process much simpler.

Pros

Community environment, integration with Qualtrics

Cons

No/Limited ability for members to self-update profiles on a regular basis. we use workaround for this.

Pros

easy to use and platforms are very intuitive. Segmentation and analysis are very helpful

Cons

video component for IDIs could be a lot better; add-on software is tedious to add and often expensive; sometimes I lack faith in the actual members of community and wonder if they just go through the surveys without actually answering questions

Pros

The software is intuitive and easy to use.

Cons

There is some minor, but basic functionality issues that could be improved - such as attachments on initial Community messages.

Pros

The team does a great job of panel management and has been incredibly helpful getting out quick hit surveys.

Cons

The panel itself has had some demographic wholes which has led to issues.

Pros

It's quite easy to build and implement survey links to my own sample when needed! The builder flow and analysis is quite intuitive.

Cons

We have some challenges with sampling pools and quality control in our data and in the reports provided to us from FC when we use them for this.

Pros

It's easy to program surveys and there are a lot of methodologies we can use for surveys. It's quick to deploy and the actual site for Brain Trust (Hulu's panel) looks good. Customer service is quick.

Cons

It's too confusing to figure out how to display an activity and send out an email. There should be a way to distribute on both channels at once. Also, there isn't an easy way to implement a weighting scheme to the data collected. I always have to download the raw data and do the analysis using another tool.

Pros

The look and feel of the community and the back end moderator dashboard are all very helpful and easy to use.

Cons

Customization within the backend was not easy to discover also access to development teams took some time.

Pros

the fact that Alchemer survey tool is integrated into it

Cons

no free facility to recruite and interview panelists - unmoderated and moderated UX testing etc

Pros

The software allows my team to quickly gather data and insights from a robust panel of actively engaged users. The data points have always been very useful in maintaining and bringing in new clients.

Cons

Sample sizes sometimes can be an issue and will delay tight turnarounds for clients.

Pros

Very good platform to use. All of the functions of the program seems intuitive.

Cons

Nothing that I like least. So far so good.

Pros

The FC support team is decently responsive and has generally met their committed deadlines.

Cons

Fuelcycle has limited API support. Also, some of the flows for the fuelcycle platform for panelists are a little clunky.