Alvaria vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

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.

Incentivized

I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
• The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
• Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.

Incentivized

• The system is a little confusing to use because of the segments and packages.
• The system seems a little outdated compared to workday and is less easy to use.
• The system doesn't tell you what went wrong in a way that is easy to translate when time off is rejected.

Incentivized

• We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.

Incentivized

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

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.

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• Creates a trackable performance for employees to receive direct feedback on ways to improve.
• Increases time spent by coordinators by creating an additional system along with the payroll scheduling system.
• Provides easy dispositioning for employees to switch tasks.

Incentivized

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized