Maintaining contact center compliance with industry regulations and protecting sensitive customer data are mission critical to outbound call center operations. Alvaria's Compliant Outreach suite of solutions, part of the larger Alvaria CX Suite, can help. The solution is based on software from the former Noble Systems, which merged with Aspect Software in 2021 to become Alvaria. Noble Systems' technology forms the basis of the Alvaria compliant outbound call center solution.
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Zuora
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
Alvaria is well suited for implementing and tracking schedules for employees where strict schedules and timely staffing is important (Call center, retail, etc). Positions that are directly customer-facing are benefitted from an accurate and consistent schedule tracking as there is an hourly workflow to handle. It is less likely to help for positions that have flexible schedules - such as creator work.
Zuroa is very well-suited for B2B businesses that primarily have a subscription stream of revenue. It is less appropriate for B2C and retail, if you are only selling one-time products or services, this tool would be overkill and confusing instead of helpful. However, if you need to recognize revenue from subscriptions over the service period, Zuora is a lifesaver.
Noble uses the same code for either Premise or Cloud, making the decision for us to go 100% Cloud simple. Our industry, like so many others, is looking to migrate to Cloud wherever possible. Deployments in a Cloud environment are much faster, from adding Agent Licenses to implementing additional products in the Noble suite. Noble monitors all servers, and adjusts as necessary, automatically, with courtesy communication to end-user as to what action was taken to prevent any production impacting event.
Noble's Enterprise Support is WORLD CLASS, providing 24/7 support. First call resolution is superb, with a "No Hassle" escalation process, all the way to CEO, if necessary. Dedicated Account Management with a tenured group of Level II technicians, assures quick resolution. Enterprise Support comes weekly/bi-weekly meetings to discuss open tickets and opportunities to upgrade to new versions of the product.
Customer inspired Road Maps to ensure needs and requirements are met, in a timely manner. Enhancements and product adds are often as a result of customer requests. Noble will tackle one-off requirements for a fee, too.
Noble Product Suite is extremely robust, resulting in minimal-to-zero additional vendor requirements, stacking on top of the product. Our IT requirement has been review and consolidates vendors where possible, and bringing Noble into the organization did just that. From Quality Assurance and Compliance to Multi-Session opportunity, Noble reduced the need to engage multiple vendors.
The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.
User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.
Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.
I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.
There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.
Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.
We utilize Noble's Enterprise Support, offering us 24/7 access. Additionally, with Enterprise Support we engage with Level II Support Technicians and no-hassle escalation. With Enterprise Support, we also have a dedicated Account Manager who conducts weekly/bi-weekly support calls to discuss open tickets and upgrade opportunities. With Enterprise Support, we have the ability to select our window for upgrades, to include weekends.
A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface
I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.
Noble offered a lot of functions for the lowest price. The QA component alone was a big selling point, along with the PCI compliance of their remote server locations. CCX was premise-based and was bulletproof. It never went down, its UI never had problems, and we never dropped calls because of it. Verint is a better QA program and has many more bells and whistles, but is very expensive compared to Noble.
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
