What are FocalReview users saying about the software?
Read what people like you have said about using FocalReview software through verified user reviews
User Review Highlights
4.62
13 Reviews
Ease-of-use
out of 5Customer Support
out of 5Value for money
out of 5Functionality
out of 5"Customisable tool that is able to fully support our compensation process and a supportive team at Spiralinks willing to go above and beyond to ensure our implementation was a success."
"This Focal Review helps us with compensation management and performance management."
"The flexibility of the system to be manipulated and tweaked to fit the needs of each client is amazing. The team behind it are super responsive and helpful and could not be recommended highly enough."
"The hierarchy system and navigation was initially confusing for some of our users."
"Reporting which is heavily used at peak times can cause a drag on performance. We have implemented a shadow reporting database and tightly managed online report access to manage this issue."
"Customisation releases demand thorough testing as they frequently need bugs fixing."
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Showing 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

Trang
Verified reviewer
Company size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Architecture & Planning
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
December 2018
Great experience with Focal Review and Spiralinks team
Pros
This Focal Review helps us with compensation management and performance management. It's not only useful for managers, but also for everyone. We can access past employee letters, statements and rewards information. It gives us many features and functions which makes our work goes smoothly.
Cons
I have nothing to complain, just need time to familiar with it before proposing it for our company.
Neil
Company size: 10,000+ employees
Industry: Banking
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
July 2018
A great partnership with SpiraLinks
A single global solution in place of 1000s of spreadsheets. Central oversight of policy application and budgets.
Pros
Delivers business requirements and can be customised if necessary. Support and response to issues by SpiraLinks is second to none.
Cons
Reporting which is heavily used at peak times can cause a drag on performance. We have implemented a shadow reporting database and tightly managed online report access to manage this issue. Our system does support c280,000 employee records which may be a factor! Customisation releases demand thorough testing as they frequently need bugs fixing.
Megan
Company size: 501-1,000 employees
Industry: Biotechnology
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
June 2019
Excellent Customer Service
Overall, the experience was good. The customer service is top notch and I think that adds so much value. The system is very easy to use for the employees.
Pros
Their customer service is fantastic! I think the end user functionality is easy to use. It is a clean design and has a lot of features and items that can be customized.
Cons
To be fair, we had a tight deadline to roll out the product so I don't think we have learned how to manage the system ourselves very well. In that regard, the system is not very intuitave or easy to use.
Ruth
Verified reviewer
Company size: 1,001-5,000 employees
Industry: Information Technology and Services
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by the software vendor to submit an honest review.
June 2021
Everyone is happy with FocalReview!
We used to use a huge spreadsheet. Obviously, this is much better. It allowed the managers to go in and adjust comp and bonus info without asking us to parse out their sections of the data. Overall, this worked extremely well.
Pros
FocalReview was easy to use and everyone was happy with it. The thing I liked most was the responsiveness of the support team. They were amazing.
Cons
I'm sure there are things that can be improved, but I can't think of any right now.

Response from SpiraLinks
Thank you for the glowing review. It was an honor to work with such professional team at Intermedia. With our latest release 9 we look forward to showing you a few new features for your next pay review cycle. Appreciate your support. Julie
Replied June 2021
Colin
Company size: 501-1,000 employees
Industry: Internet
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
November 2017
Simple implementation, great customer support and flexible functionality
Streamlined our appraisal process massively and provided better data security and ability to spend time on analytics as opposed to manually administrating the process.
Pros
The flexibility of the system to be manipulated and tweaked to fit the needs of each client is amazing. The team behind it are super responsive and helpful and could not be recommended highly enough. The ease at setting up security and profiles and that fact I know who has access to what data allows us to sleep at night during our appraisal process.
Cons
There's very little to dislike. The reporting functionality is quite basic but as you can get everything to excel doesn't cause major issues.
Elizabeth
Company size: 1,001-5,000 employees
Industry: Architecture & Planning
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
July 2016
Flexible, configurable, role-based modules
I've implemented FocalReview at 2 companies, including my current employer. The software can be configured to do exactly what we need, and we have the ability to customize reports and labels to align with our internal policies and language. Being Role-based allows us to configure very granular access/assignments and they can be changed on the fly. The support team is fantastic, consistently going above and beyond to accommodate changes or updates, often with very little turn-around time or notice.

Response from SpiraLinks
Thank you Elizabeth for a great review!. Julie
Replied July 2016
Rob
Time used: Free Trial
Review Source: Capterra
May 2016
Cost effective salary review solution
After several years of attempting to complete Global salary reviews in Excel we decided to implement Spiralinks Focal Review solution to help improve efficiency and remove the usual bugs that come with overcomplicated excel workbooks. The end result is our most successful salary review yet! I've been impressed with the speedy turnaround as we audited our data and send countless updates across and this has helped us to be responsive to business need. My only build would be to improve the user interfaces so that the superuser can amend data more readily. If you want a cost effective solution to aid your salary review processes then look no further!

Response from SpiraLinks
Thank you for your review Rob. We very much appreciate you time. Julie
Replied July 2016
Sally
Time used: Free Trial
Review Source: Capterra
January 2016
Dynamic and versatile platform which is very user friendly
The Spiralinks platform is versatile to meet the changing needs of our business. The customer service is excellent, with rapid turnaround of requests. The team are dedicated to ensurung the best possible user experience and are a pleasure to work with. Employees are able to use the system with minimal guidance / support. The reporting capability of the system is excellent, poviding us and managers with dynamic statistics statistics which is very useful. Excellent system that we would use again.

Response from SpiraLinks
Thank you very much Ms Knill. It is our pleasure to have Victrex as a client. Julie Southern, Head of SpiraLinks.
Replied January 2016
Alice
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
November 2017
Fantastic experience with both the tool and the Spiralinks team
Pros
Customisable tool that is able to fully support our compensation process and a supportive team at Spiralinks willing to go above and beyond to ensure our implementation was a success
Cheryl
Company size: 201-500 employees
Industry: Financial Services
Time used: Less than 6 months
Review Source: Capterra
June 2017
A great product - highly configurable, even for our complex compensation structure.
It automated a process that we ran on spreadsheets and using mail merges. A great improvement.
Pros
The ability to look back at a full breakdown of compensation over multiple years and the additional functionality which handles the production of our compensation statements.
Cons
I'm still not entirely convinced by the budget setting screens, which displayed the salary budget in a way that confused some of the managers. However, this may have been caused by the way in which we set up the hierarchy.
Howard
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
April 2018
Very positive experience with Spiralinks. Extremely customer service oriented. Support is amazing.
Pros
Very flexible software with easy configuration. We implemented only the performance review module.
Cons
As the software is cloud and Saas base we had some issues with Browser compatibility but Spiralink was able to analyze, test and advise of solutions.
Darien
Time used: Less than 6 months
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
May 2018
Great tool for managing reviews. Very flexible and excellent customer support
Pros
It is very customizable with a great team behind it to configure the software to meet our needs. I like that it also supports matrix organization views and the ability to generate reports.
Cons
The hierarchy system and navigation was initially confusing for some of our users. We also had some issues with logging in, but they have all been resolved.
Nikki
Company size: 1,001-5,000 employees
Industry: Architecture & Planning
Time used: Less than 6 months
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
October 2018
Spiralinks review
Pros
The system offers many features and functionality
Cons
The various features and functionalities are not apparent for a first time user

Response from SpiraLinks
Thank you Nikki!
Replied November 2018
