What are Centercode users saying about the software?

Product Review

Overall I am very happy with Centercode and would recommend them to any customer research group looking to conduct Alpha, Beta, or Field testing.

Pros

Centercode is an excellent tool that helps Bluebeam organize test participants and run multiple simultaneous customer validation projects. Being able to use data science to turn the "voice of the customer" into actionable business intelligence has made our products better and helped foster a sense of cooperation and trust between Bluebeam and our Customers.

Cons

The administrative interface takes a while to get used to. I was a DBA for several years so the "data model" and filtering make sense to me, but for some of our design and product users the ability to review feedback has been a struggle.

Single Platform to Manage Alpha/Beta Programs

I think the positives definitely outweigh the negatives - so glad to have a single platform where I can manage, collect, and review alpha and beta feedback. Not sure how I lived without it!

Pros

Centercode is a fantastic solution for any org wanting to run an efficient alpha or beta program - it allows you to manage the entire end-to-end process in one platform. Onboarding users is a breeze - the platform allows for surfacing of appropriate NDA's, the builds that you want the users to access, and all of the tasks that you want your users to tackle. We leverage the forums to encourage feedback and discussion from our testers, and to promote discussion between testers. Their online guides + educational materials available online a superb and super helpful.

Cons

The overhead of setting up a project is not always intuitive - you sometimes end up digging through the various Project Tools to determine where things need to be setup. The way Centercode has determined you should gather feedback is okay 90% of the time - on the odd occasion that you need to run an alpha with a little less overhead for gathering feedback, it can be a little rigid.

Music technology is a long-term experience

Centercode is an one-stop-solution for private beta testing. There are great things about it and things that could be improved. At any time the Centercode Team will be there for you, to train or explain to you how things work. So overall it's a pretty good experience.

Pros

Centercode helps with getting long-term feedback from a dedicated community of (private) beta participants. It's an all encompassing tool supporting our needs for: - hosting and communicating with our UR & QA communities - collecting unsolicited feedback (forums, suggestions) - collecting focused, solicited feedback (surveys, emails)

Cons

Workflows are abstract and usually there is one, abstract way to setting something up. The IA is mostly centered around artefacts not workflows, which doesn't help. If you don't use or set up workflows all the time, you need to constantly relearn a lot. This can lead to fewer users (internal users, like designers or developers) engaging with the software. The whole user experience definitely leads to a bias in external user participation, only technically inclined people will participate actively on this platform.

Initial pilot feedback

The Centercode team was great to work with and I believe we have started to create a great foundation for our partnership moving forward. The program we piloted was challenging and we ran into some unforeseen challenges but the team remained positive, creative and committed to getting the best possible results.

Pros

Ease of use and ability to quickly communicate to testing community to encourage engagement and gather feedback.

Cons

For our purposes, the weekly reports seemed like a little bit of overkill but I can see where the level of detailed information would be valuable in a more 'typical' program. It would be nice if the output could be more tailored based on the program but that may be because we purchased the 'off the shelf' program initially.

A great product with even greater support

When I first began using Centercode, I had not built a relationship with their support and relied solely on the suggested methods of the people in my role before me. At that time, I was not a fan of Centercode and felt the platform was cumbersome; however, once I reached out to Centercode I learned that many of the things I was taught internally were not the right way of doing things and the support TRULY retrained me into how to work with the product. Once I removed my learned bad habits, it changed everything and I am in love with this tool and what it can do. Using this product correctly (which is a loose term, because once you know what it can do, there are so many ways you can use it) has saved me time and my company money and has improved customer engagement in testing.

Pros

The greatest feature of the platform is the customization and custom automation. If you put in the work to seek what can be done, you will find plenty of ways to automate or simplify so many things. The support is very helpful in getting you on the right path, as well.

Cons

My only real complaint about the platform is the process of implementing complex filters. At the time of this writing, creating a complex filter requires cycling through filtering, implementing the filter, then filtering again, etc. In speaking with Centercode, they are already in works of improving this process to be more streamlined and I am confident that will improve this.

Essential for any validation professional

Centercode solves the problem of validating features at scale. Without a validation platform, validating a single feature is a full-time job. With Centercode, I can run several projects simultaneously and easily track my team's management of individual projects. Any questions or concerns I have with Centercode are addressed promptly; they're a pleasure to work with.

Pros

It's a comprehensive feature validation solution. I can do almost anything within the scope of validation using Centercode and what I can't do is usually easy to work around. It allows me and my team to manage validation projects at scale.

Cons

I'd like to see minor bugs and UX issues addressed more frequently than they are. It'd be nice to have more comprehensive documentation as well.

Centercode SaaS Platform

Centercode is used for our Enterprise Software betas - I've been very pleased with the ability to provide a 24x7 support platform for our beta testers to find information, access code and request assistance. I'm also able to report on feedback items to ensure timely responses.

Pros

The flexibility, data capture and reporting

Cons

Would like more included APIs to easily integrate with other systems

One-Stop Shop for Customer Validation

Centercode allows us to not only have a place to "house" and communicate with all of our testers, but a place for these testers to see tasks, submit bugs/suggestions, complete surveys, and contact us. Additionally, the reporting tool is a great way to get info to stakeholders.

Pros

- All testers in one place - Many features (email, surveys, reporting) - 1-20+ projects - Customer support

Cons

Many features = lots to set up/pay attention to (but a template helps!)

Good software but coud be great

Good experience but it can be a challenge as a UK user due to the time difference for support. Also the lack of an app, it's really needed now to allow trialists the ability to quickly feedback via their devices. Overall though it does what you need just sometimes takes longer than you'd think it'd take

Pros

Has the basic features that allow you to effectively manage a trial

Cons

Lack of intuitive features and a more user friendly CX

Dense tool that requires training to utilize well; good for forums but not great surveys and reports

Overall, I am glad we are using Centercode but I think they have room to improve in making the tool more user friendly.

Pros

I like that it keeps our 200+ monthly Beta users organized for us in one place (before, we had to manually track who was in our Beta in Google Sheets. It makes it really easy to communicate with our users all at once and automatically give them ongoing surveys. I also like the forum elements like praise, ideas, and problems where users can add things and upvote others. This helps me with prioritization as a product manager.

Cons

The survey report tool is so clunky and takes a long time to create a report with all the right filters etc. I have to re-add all the filters for every single chart or graph in my report, so the whole process just takes forever. It is a dense tool with lots of options and features so if you haven't gone through the training, the UX is not intutive.

Centercode increased my value to the organization

Centercode has increased the value my department brings to the organization: -Resolving user experience issues -Resolving technical issues with planned maintenance updates, reducing customer impact -Help manage large enterprise testing programs with up to 5K employee testers -Experiment with new products and services to identify marketing and improvement opportunities -Employees reported over 1K unique issues over the past 6 Months -Easy to establish bi-directional communications with testers -Easy to automate communications and messaging to keep testers engaged and informed

Pros

Centercode makes it very easy to establish two-way communication, post notices and follow-ups, with participants. Speed is essential to triage critical impacting issues. Centercode makes it easy to manage the feedback loop and track individual communications in a central repository. The use of automated messaging increases participant engagement. Automate messaging helps to reduce PM communication workload to notify participants/internal members of critical fix/updates on reported issues and to communicate important information.

Cons

I dislike lease the user data import form. The more complex our projects become, the greater the need to append different types of data to participant project profile for faster triage. The import process is cumbersome, and does not work well with large amounts of data. It does not provide sufficient error messaging to alert user of specific issues with imported data.

My #1 Software Product

We've used Centercode for over 10 years now for pre-release validation of the majority of our software products; it enables us to quickly identify design/implementation/quality issues & ensure that they are addressed prior to release. We always release with confidence. More importantly it has been a vital mechanism for us to establish some extremely critical business relationships with our customers. Without Centercode our ability to engage with our customers would be severely limited. I consider it to be mission critical for us. Our relationship with Centercode has been mutually beneficial; we enjoy a very close relationship & this results in our enhancement & support requests being resolved in a very timely manner. The whole ethos of this company & their resulting products & services cannot be understated; this starts with the CEO & runs throughout the company. A real pleasure to partner with them.

Pros

Centercode is infinitely configurable especially with the most recent integration capabilities. It's always the first software product I go to when challenged with a new way to engage with our customers. Invariably when others can't find the answers/info they need from "their" systems I can use the Centercode capabilities to achieve the desired results.

Cons

Quite a steep learning curve for new users.

Great product, great people, great company!

Cetnercode's platform has allowed us to become more efficient and consistent in how we evaluate our products prior to market launch. They have provided top notch support and are always happy to have a conversation or extend their knowledge to their user base on best practices or alternate ways of accomplishing a goal Great product, great people, great company.

Pros

The platform offered by Centercode is extremely adaptable to various business needs related to product validation. They take a lot of guess work out of the tests we run by providing general templates and industry knowledge. The platform itself allows for customization and has supported all of our needs over the years Their support team is top notch and the rest of their employees are excellent to interact with. Truly a top notch product and company

Cons

It is so powerful that sometimes a user can get lost or not understand the repercussions of an action they take. I suppose this is a good problem but can take a while to on-board a new employee and get them up to speed on the intricacies and capabilities of the platform

Our main working platform, overall quite satisfied

As already mentioned above, the platform delivers us everything, we usually need. And they are going on enhancing it with new features and improvements quite often. Because of the wide selection of features and functionalities, it was not that easy to use at the beginning, but we got a good training then. If there is something wrong (a bug or if I do not understand something), the Centercode team is very quick, professional and nice.

Pros

Mighty tool: User management, communication, surveys, feedback management, release distribution, providing activation keys etc. We usually can do everything for our tests in the Centercode platform. The support is very fast and the people working there are professional and nice. Also, customizable. We were able to whitelable it quite good (custom CSS, custom string sets, banners, colors, ...).

Cons

Sometimes, we struggle with bugs. But those are mostly fixed very fast and the support provides good workarounds.

Centercode review

We have a centralized place for interacting with our customers, the tool helps create a focal point for this interaction. Due to the flexibility of the tool, we can integrate other components we need to complete our workflow like Jira, file attachments, links to surveys, etc. I use some of the advanced features, when I have time to figure them out (i.e. tasks), so that is also great. Also Centercode provides excellent, responsive support to any questions we have.

Pros

Great forums, work on many devices (computers, tablets, etc) Love the integration with Jira, helps get items in our backlog Love the ability to host files, attachments Love the 'tasks' feature for users (though I wish it was simpler) also love the reports feature (though I wish it was simpler) I love the ability to get data on our participants

Cons

Forum usage, admin, etc. is quite straight forward; however, ease of use for all the extra features is very, very low. Even creating tasks involves many steps that are not always clear. I would like to use CC to generate surveys but again, it is too complex so I use Survey Monkey instead. Also I wish reports were much simpler and faster to generate because the data within them is so valuable.

Best all-in-one solution for Beta but poor UX (especially mobile) and lacks many basic features

Overall we enjoy CC and the community loves it, but we believe that a better mobile experience along with easier rich text boxes and faster load would increase our volume by at least 20% (just a wild assumption but we hear this feedback a lot from users we meet f2f). I think that it's essential that users get the option to really custom their homepage (like a Wix/Google Site experience) and that the opportunities menus are clearer. After 2 years of using CC I have no idea how to use it properly as everything is slow and complex. It has to be thoroughly looked into from the user perspective. Yes, there are useful help articles, but the UI itself has to be clearer. We spend hours just trying thing out before we really understand what changes we made.

Pros

I like the fact that it has everything in one place. You can scroll from a forum to a bug all in one place

Cons

The fact that it has very limited design that you cannot customize as much as you need. The mobile UX is just not good enough.

Excellent Customer Validation Solution

We have seen a huge increase in the amount of customer feedback received during our alpha, beta, and pilot phases. This has led to a large reduction in negative experiences downstream after product launch. We've been able to save money, improve overall NPS scores on particular products, and take our offerings to the next level. This is all because we were able to catch issues earlier on in the development cycle, thanks to Centercode making it easy to interact with our customers.

Pros

I loved the overall feature set that Centercode came with, even at the lower subscription tiers. There are countless ways to customize the software, and that lends itself heavily to the overall positive impact that I had using the software. Not only that, the customer service is TOP NOTCH. I have never had a poor interaction with Centercode's support team. They are, hands down, one of the best that I've interacted with. They sincerely care about their customers and their success.

Cons

The learning curve can be somewhat high, but I think that's more a result of how one implements the software in their organization, rather than Centercode being hard to learn. That being said, to get the full value of Centercode, it did take me a while to get the hang of it.

Indispensable Tool for Beta Programs

Centercode helps my team and I keep up with increasing demands for customer insights and pre-release feedback. It's a productivity multiplier, allowing one experienced user to accomplish about 4X as much as they'd be able to do without it. While the price is on the higher end for what you get, their support is fantastic and the program-building advice and guidance you get from their customer success team is an often under-appreciated value add.

Pros

Breadth of features is truly impressive. There's so much that Centercode can do that sometimes it's almost overwhelming. If you can dream it, there's a good chance Centercode can do it - it just might take some creativity in working around limitations.

Cons

The new user experience from a project admin standpoint is tough. There's so much to learn. I usually dedicate at least a week to just Centercode training when I onboard a new team member, and even then, there are so many small details that you don't really figure out until you've already made a mistake.

Swiss Army Knife for Customer Validation

The Centercode platform allows us to test prereleased builds with enthusiastic users in a very structured way. The people behind Centercode ensure to share their best practices in every possible way which is very helpful to everyone who is new but also for more senior platform users.

Pros

The Centercode Platform offers a lot of tools and possibilities to create a comprehensive Customer Validation Test environment. But it's not only the platform but also the Team behind it who is very passioned about their field of work and their help to make sure you have success with the tool.

Cons

This platform is not particularly a community platform which is a little bit frustrating but also understandable. If you are looking to setup a community only using Centercode it's going to be a lot more effort when it comes to messaging. Furthermore the usability especially for onboarding new users and administrators to manage the platform could be improved.

Great product with extensive features and incredible customer support!

Centercode is a great product. We were initially in search of a platform that would allow us to distribute BETA product software builds to external program participants. The search lead us to Centercode which provided the basic functionality we needed plus so much more. Fast forward almost seven years later and we are using Centercode to completely manage our Product Validation Program including BETA release distribution, tester management, feedback collection, bug tracking and reporting.

Pros

- BETA release management including attachments and download tracking - Feedback forms with customizable fields - Communication options with email templates - User (tester) segregation via groups ("Teams") - Data export options including reports and email ("External Destinations") - Site configuration with custom branding ("Visual Themes") - First class, top-notch, incredible customer support team!

Cons

Customer support is typically only available during US West Coast (GMT-7) business hours

Best Beta Management software out there!

Very good! Totally professional from their sales teams to their support group, I have never had a bad experience with Centercode. They are always willing to help.

Pros

Performs very well, never an outage in over 10 years of use that affected us. Very configurable for both customer facing parts as well as for beta manager set ups. One stop shop for all things beta. integrates nicely with JIRA and our SSO systems for internal programs as well. Support is top notch and quick to resolve any self inflicted issues we cause.

Cons

Some customers (users) sometimes complain about the UI being difficult to navigate but once we show them the first time, they get it. We do typically have to engage CC tech support to assist with our migrations and set up of our integrations, a wizard to help with this might be helpful.

Great tool for managing your customer validation tests

Support from CC has always been prompt and efficient. If you need additional help such as creating reports that you just don't have time to do, you can purchase service credits to get that work done. Their management is always listening to customers to see how they can improve.

Pros

The tool allows you to manage your testers, their tasks and survey results all in one tool. Everything from getting the testers to complete their profile to recruiting them to specific tests if very simple.

Cons

Scoring our testers has been a challenge and understanding how much a tester is participating is something that we have had to manage with PowerBi.

Feeback on Centercode Platform

It has been nice. The staff has been supportive and they take feedback constructively

Pros

Ease of making reports in the project, access levels can be controlled, JIRA, Aha integration

Cons

1. Does not let you create feedback reports for projects at a community level 2. Formatting tools are not sufficient and user friendly and requires you to check JSON coding in order to format text (For email purpose, creating documents for license agreement etc). I would have appreciated if there were simple formatting tools like word 3. Portrait mode is not there for reports

CenterCode Review

Excellent people to work with. Always prompt, courteous, and professional to deal with.

Pros

Excellent collaboration tool with our beta customers. Tool is the back bone at how we interact and collect data from our beta customer testers

Cons

The reporting module really needs some help. It is almost unusable as it is impossible to manipulate / customize look and feel of charts and tables into usable / publishable reports. The tool needs the ability to export report data into customized PowerPoint template. Because of the reporting limitations, I typically export the data out into CSV files and then manipulate it in Excel as work around. This creates extra work on my part as I have to hand build weekly beta reports in PowerPoint using the Excel charts and tables. I see this as the biggest limitation with the tool. If Centercode can improve this then the tool would get 5 / 5 stars easily.

Extremely valuable software

It is very easy for our support team to contact the customers and report back on the issues they reported.

Pros

This software is an extremely valuable program for running a Customer Validation Program. It make recruiting easy and provides a great method for users to report any issues they may encounter. It is easy to respond back to them with our findings and solutions. Centercode support is extremely friendly and helpful anytime we have questions for them.

Cons

It can be a little cumbersome to setup initially.