What do you dislike about PR Newswire?
PR Newswire online experience was dreadful. First off, the login asks for username but you are supposed to use your email. I had a username with CISION, which was another awful login experience altogether. I had to call support just to login and though support was very helpful and quick to get to me, they asked, "are you a CISION migration." When i said yes, they said, "oh we're taking a lot of calls from those migrations, I'm sorry you're having trouble."
Logging in was only the tip of the iceberg. The whole posting-through-their-portal experience was dreadful.
1. You get an error trying to get to billing system and have to contact your rep. I did so and he never replied.
2. Because of problem in #1 you don't know what your license covers. This is important because you undoubtedly will check the distributions that aren't covered in your license and there is an added cost. You must be careful here and it is very scummy of PR Newswire not to allow you to view what is covered by your license. I still don't know.
3. After speaking with support, they said they understand the issue in #2 above and apologized and said they would set my account up so that only options that are covered by my license are available to click on. That never happened and on my next distribution, they tried to charge me extra for selecting an extra distribution that was not in my plan. Again, there is no way to view what is in your plan bc it is not in the UI and you cannot access billing portal to see what is in your plan.
4. The UI is terribly designed, not intuitive at all. Other than the problem in 2 above, you aren't able to get a PDF preview so you don't know what they are posting unless you call them and ask for a PDF. I was told there is a view PDF option in the UI but there is not.
5. In my case, I was told to call in to get my distribution live. This completely defeats the purpose of having an online portal for distributions. The first PR they apologized for this and I asked if they could set it up so that i didn't have to call them every time i had a distribution. They assured me I would not have to call them next time.
6. Next distribution I had to call them to get it approved after saying I did not have to do that.
I've been in the software business for 20+ years and have the utmost empathy for people working in tech. I also know when an app has poor requirements that aren't user needs, and is rushed and not properly tested. This is one of the worst software experiences I've ever had. Took us about 3 hours to do a distribution and through the submit-for-approval process. We also use EIN Newswire (we are an agency) and I can do this process there in about 15 minutes.
I suspect, a legacy PR Newswire customer experience might be better than mine for we were migrated from CISION, which had its own set of submission issues. All-in-all I cannot recommend PR Newswire. I declined on my client's behalf to renew a license because of this terrible user experience where it takes hours to submit a PR. Objectively and fairly I could not bill this client for the hours spent trying to get through the bad EUX and ended up eating a lot of billing hours due to their poor app design. We are glad to have this company's bad tech behind us after the license period lapsed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
