Blink Reviews

In searching for a new communication platform, I thought I knew what I was looking for and which company I would go with. Blink was added as just another platform for comparison. However, during my first demo, I was convinced this was the right choice. It ticked off all the boxes: top down communication, bottom up communication, side to side communication, individual and group chats, an information repository, and one of the best price points of (in my opinion) even inferior platforms. Plus, they were up front about all costs, so I didn't have to worry about a surprise invoice I would have to explain.

There are a few small functionality issues I have had since getting into the platform (such as not having control over what shows up under an employee name or what is displayed in the Directory), but I have been assured the team is adding my suggestions to their list and looking into how we can work around the other issues.

I really like the concept of feed to allow official communication in the same tool than chat, without sending email. It create a community feeling.

- Searching some discussion with someone is not easy (What we discussed 4 days ago on the chat ?)
- I haven't capability to mark a discussion as "unread" (I open the discussion on my phone, see somthing I will have to analyse before answering, I have to send email to me to think about that)
- When I do some mistake on a sentence, I have to click on edit, so use the mouse, instead of just use the up arrow, like in softwares like discord, that is very simplest to edit.
- For integration with a tool, I need administrator to allow me to do something (i.e jira) so I'm not free to use all capabilities of Blink.
- If I join files in a discussion, I can't arrange them, so theorically we have to create one different chat for each subject, but to search a chat from people name, I have always to click on "see all chats", so use the mouse, that is break the user experience from my point of view.

Simple IM app and the newsfeed like appearance of the home page. Some limited integrations, calendar works well.

Lacking in support for 3rd party apps, no ability to view documents in the app only have attachments.

The simplicity of the software is amazing. The roll out process to frontline staff takes less than a minute as it is so obvious and intuitive.

The speed that it performs without fail is amazing and the constant improvements to functionality are great

Not sure I can put anything here - every snag we've come up the Blink team have worked around and found solutions.

The product is easy to use. The possibility to create group is very interesting, as group can be done with the right persons to talk a specific subject. The global feed allows to share general information about the company.

The copy / paste option is working only in the blink feed. No possibility to copy directly to a Google Mail by example.

- Ability to share and communicate with all employees or with individual teams
- Quick and helpful responses from Blink staff/developers -- willingness to go above and beyond to meet our company's needs
- Allows for multiple administrators at different levels
- Ease of use
- Ability to communicate privately -- staff can even contact our CEO and get a real-time response
- Real-time chat
- Search feature
- Ability to use on smartphone and PC

When we first started using Blink, posts were limited to one attachment each, which has since been updated. Blink has evolved quickly and quite honestly we have zero complaints.

the home feed page for seeing and sharing what is going on in and around the business.

The initial phase I struggled to search for specific items referred to, and sharing that with others in the business.

Since Blink was introduced into our company it has changed the way we communicate. Prior to it's introduction we had no central communication hub. We have over 100 care homes, very many staff and customers all over the UK, so we are very remote from each other.

Since Blink was introduced, we can now see posts from other services showing their activities and milestone celebrations. It connects central services to our homes and each home with each other making us feel part of the wider company rather than just a lone care home. This has been particularly important during the isolation of Covid in the past year and a half.

We also have all of our policies and procedures in one place on the Blink Hub.

A bit like Facebook - once a post has gone down the feed it is sometimes hard to find again if you need to refer to it again, this is especially difficult if the post is important information - say new rules regarding Covid.

Sometimes it is hard to find a particular Policy or Procedure in the Hub - but that might be more about how and where it is uploaded - I am not sure?

Blink is very easy to use for instant conversations and messaging, also very easy to start an instant meeting, a simple forward slash and you are good to go. The product also makes it easy to set up group chats and this can be done on the fly in the middle of a meeting without too much effort. Also has some nice aesthetic features,e.g. throwing confetti! I also like the fact that the developers look for ongoing feedback to further enhance the product, as this product grows it will become even better and more established. Interesting enough people now talk about sending blinks and setting up blink meetings - the name is becoming synonymous with what it does and replacing the typical grammar.

For some reason, it is easier to use on the phone than the PC itself. Every time you hit the return button on the PC it sends that as a blink when actually it might be you starting a new paragraph. Other than this minor issue I don't have anything too negative to say!

It is very easy to communicate with colleagues and make groups

Notification in Window 10 are not very visible

The Feed has provided an excellent platform for colleagues as well as our Comms team to share company news. We are able to measure via Analytics how this has improved engagement via Likes and Comments.
Users familiar with SM platforms feel immediately at home.

The Hub delivers a major part of what we wanted to achieve in terms of sharing material across our multi national offices and has become our single source of truth. The ease of use is such that little or no user instruction has been required.

As an Admin there is virtually no learning curve when setting up users, or populating content.

Having multiple methods of signing users up is useful where colleagues are factory/office/home based.

We would like more flexibility in the Directory in terms of displaying multiple contact numbers i.e internal phone extension, mobile and direct dial numbers.

A calendar with room booking functionality would be good.

We have yet to integrate with company systems so cannot comment at this time.

After several false starts with other applications, the team quickly adopted Blink. Within two weeks we had rolled out Blink as the tool of choice. We are distributed over two offices and/or on customer site - so having a central messaging tool that everyone uses is great. New joiners find it easy to learn/use.

We have some company-wide channels, individual team channels, lots of ad hoc groups, and then normal direct messaging. Due to the ease of use we use it regularly to bring small/ad hoc project teams together in order to share documentation and messaging.

The fact that there is a desktop app, a web app, an iOS app and Android app means Blink can be used where ever you are. We like the lightning-quick search, have linked it to both Jira and Office 365, and have plans to extend it with an in-house Bot.

New features are released on a regular basis and if we have any questions then we have found the support to be very quick and helpful.

The main limitation is that we still need to use a separate application for screen sharing and voice calls. It would be nice if this feature was added. However, we would rather use Blink for messaging and sharing than go to product that was a unified platform but a poorer experience. For that reason we still currently use Skype for Business for voice and screen sharing but have chosen not to use Microsoft Teams for colloboration as we think Blink is a far better experience.

It's super easy to set up and use. The team at Blink are always quick to respond, listen to feedback and suggestions for future features.
Integration with some business applications have been useful for daily updates.

Now that they've allowed multiple photo uploads and direct video posts I can't think of much else. Permission levels could do with more rejigging as most things if you're not admin you can't control perhaps there could be something inbetween admin and user.
Also if you're not part of a team you can't post to that news feed - however there are times when someone from one team might want to post something to only a couple of teams but not the whole company and that's not easily achieveble. Perhaps "team admins" can post to other team news feeds and just not see any of the feed other than their own post?
Perhaps business collaboration tools could be more advanced?

New feature around recognition is great, and stops people using Whats App. Can put out regular comms and stops us having to communicate everything by email. We can use the hub to store all of our policies on there and information and newsletters. It also is a central hub, so we put links for our other software that we use such as recruitment or our HR systems

The news feed could really do we a better focus and filter on categories. So you can select one or more categories so you don't see everything. Having priority posting can get out of control. Would like it to be able to reduce reports on usage better to show how many posts people have done or have many likes people have done. Helps the business to understand the engagement, so more stats on this the better

Blink allows us the ability to send out mass punch memo-style notifications, news, events, recognition and team alignment that, otherwise, we would not have or would still be doing via traditional email and group texting forms of communication. It's a game-changer for employee alertness to company happenings.

I believe Blink will continue to improve their team chats and team collaboration/task management features.

The ability to allow users to express themselves via the newsfeed, whilst also being able to filter to reach out to certain departments via groups has been great for users needing support from a certain department, or simply sharing a post they want everyone to see. This has led to the company being able to share posts for the entire company as a priority and needing users to acknowledge the posts, which means we can assure users have read important posts. It also has a community feel to it and also can help with boosting morale as we have been able to post about achievements in different depots across the company.
What is also great is the ability to create a hub, with useful links that the entire company uses, which makes it a fully working intranet for us.

We had teething issues to start regarding invites, where someone will try to join but will be stuck in an endless loop. This hasn't happened recently and can be solved using an invite code rather than an invite link. During this time Blink support did quickly help us out with the issue.

Blink has really changed the way our business looks at communicating with our front line workers. We've had this for almost 3 years now and we haven't looked back since.

It's so easy to onboard our new workers to the business, and the ability to share information instantly is amazing!

There's nothing at all that I like least about this software

Since working from home Blink has been invaluable to our team as it allows us to communicate throughout the work day as if we were in the office.

Sometimes news feed is hard to filter and important information can sometimes be missed

This app makes other apps like slack look like a joke. It channels, feeds, documents, integrations. So much more for less.

On occasion we have to refresh the app. Not the end of the world by any means and I feel confident they'll work through random bugs!

The ability to communicate, connect, engage and share content is as simple as possible using Blink! We love the engagement we get from staff through likes, comments and acknowledgements which are vital to to us.

Three file maximum upload to posts can be a nightmare when we are doing big campaigns to staff especially around COVID since we are a health care company. Additionally, the 250mb max upload is again a hurdle due to us having to upload various videos which we have to upload via youtube and link it through due to size restrictions.

Blink is a really good business communications tool, some pros of the platform are:
- Good, customisable interface
- You can now filter and search posts by person
- Directory of colleagues

There's some areas Blink could improve by thinking about functionality for the user and the needs of big organisations e.g.
- You can't disable notifications from specific people
- You can't disable notifications by day of the week, only by time - get posts on weekends
- As our company is so big it can get really messy and flooded, more filter options could be beneficial

As a fast-growing company, Blink allowed us to create a single point of internal communication to reach outside of the traditional email and messaging platforms. We were able to share company news, team or individual kudos in no time and share the exciting news.

I would like to have pdfs upload with a screenshot rather than an icon

Function, user friendly and the team at Blink. They understand the business we are and what the objective was to deliver to the frontline workers.

We need understand further before we can express any con's at the moment.

- free for up to 20 users
- great alternative to a company intranet / communication portal for the micro businesses who want to share their management system documentation with field staff and don't want to fork out expensive licences with Microsoft for similar products like yammer / SharePoint.
- if you are IT savvy and know how to build microapps feature will draw your attention.
- Can download on android and iOS devices
- Has a desktop app for windows and iOS devices

- you have to purchase the premier package at a monthly cost per user to do branding. It would be good if there was a fixed fee per month for up to 10 users for the small companies e.g. £20 plus VAT.

The chat is our most used feature by far.

With most colleagues working remotely, Blink is our most critical comms software. Not being able to see who is online/available, busy, or away on leave is very frustrating (and seems like an easy addition).