Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued) vs. Parature (Discontinued)

Agiloft is most suited to meeting the needs of an organization that requires rapid and frequent process changes for critical processes, and values empowering the people who do the job to determine how best to automate it - essentially rapidly growing, democratic organization.It's hard to imagine an inappropriate scenario to use Agiloft, but one that comes to mind is organzations requiring a complete, finished, highly structured solution that they do not want to change over time. Agiloft is designed with the expectation that clients will adapt it to their needs so many functions are left undone, rather than throwing a "kitchen sink" at the customer and letting them choose what they need.The best way to work with Agiloft is to take the training class, then have a small success with a small team, involving the employees and first level management in the deployment. They'll tell everyone else how much they like it. This reduces the possibility of slow development cycles and an undue dependence on outside expertise, while maximizing the return on Agiloft's investment in easy customizability.

The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.

Incentivized

• Fully GUI based interface that has drastically reduced the time to add new features/workflows.
• The product was very easy to deploy and add features like Single-Sign On and user provisioning from our internal DataWarehouse. Again, vendor support was a big help while implementing those features.
• The workflows include a very comprehensive rule-based system that can trigger various actions like escalations, emails, changes of request state and more. All without any coding. Again, fully GUI based.

• Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
• Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
• Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.

Incentivized

• With flexibility comes complexity, so we have needed to use consulting time to implement some of our needs. The learning curve can be steep, but the product can accommodate nearly any scenario.
• At one point we seemed to have some performance issues, but those seem to be in the past.
• The text messaging integration would be nice.

• Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
• The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
• Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
• The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
• It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.

Incentivized

We're comfortable and happy with our purchase of Agiloft. Our end users have been happy with the tool, and appreciate the time savings and efficiency it has gave them. Agiloft also appears to actually care about you being a customer, which makes a difference to me.

Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative

Incentivized

For the most part, it is an easy and intuitive system to use. There are many small things that could be improved to make the system work even easier. However, overall it is very easy to use if you have a good grasp on computer programs and using them to build things. I do not have any computer science or programming background, and I am able to use this system with few problems.

It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.

Incentivized

They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.

Incentivized

We often hear back very quickly with answers to our questions. They also support their answers at times with screenshots and videos to help further explain their advice and suggestions. The only reason it isn't a 10 is because sometimes using only the online support system, sometimes things aren't communicated as well as they would be over the phone. However, we know if there is a major issue going on, we can call Agiloft for support.

Nothing ever seemed to get resolved

Incentivized

Most of the other CRM software packages we evaluated were either too complicated or time
consuming to setup and customize, or they were too expensive, especially since many
of the companies charge additional fees for each additional module or function
you want to use.

There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs

Incentivized

• Helps us organize tasks and projects and the data associated with each project
• Helps us organize our resources to meet the demand of issues and events
• This has helped us keep moving forward during times we otherwise would have pulled back.
• Completely revolutionized our way of work life. Upwards of approx 300 percent productivity and complexity..

• Parature allows for better Customer Service
• Can follow up automatically for tickets
• Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to.
• Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed.

Incentivized