Bright Pattern Contact Center vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

Bright Pattern has been fantastic in allowing us to automate voice and chat contacts, and we're currently building out scenarios that will allow us to automate even more. It's super simple to collect data from customers, and using some API calls provides the answers they're looking for without a human needing to get involved. There is less functionality currently for emails. Emails can be routed to queues based on keywords, and auto-replies can be sent, but it's pretty basic functionality. We'd love to see some of the enhanced capabilities offered in voice and chat scenarios for email.

Incentivized

Probably where you have a number of service teams that all contribute to a knowledge base is one area that's really useful. AI response, it looks like with AgentForce, that's going to be one of our next deployments. So they're AI based on the trust layer is, I like that it has the trust layer because it's already got some built in safeguards around privacy and security controls for AI, which is very important right now. Where it's probably less useful:gain, round robining a very email heavy conversation, so it's not the best email tool. A lot of our team still uses Gmail and logs to the case rather than actually emailing directly out of Salesforce. Email signatures are not great because you can only have plain text email signatures, you can't have HTML.

Incentivized

• AI platform integration - IBM Watson, Google Dialogflow, for example
• Quality Management - out of the box sentiment anlysis
• Unified agent desktop - ability to see all channels in one pane of glass
• Robust analytic widgets that can also drive wall boards

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• Realtime reporting is good but there should be a pop out if supervisor or a manager wants to see his whole team.
• Wallboard needs to have some calculations option. Ofcourse APIs are there but still we recommend
• Wallboard needs to have more options to customise

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

Es una plataforma confiable, en la que ya tengo bastante tiempo utilizando y conociendola. Entonces me siento confiada en volver a utilizarla dentro de la empresa e igual que al ofrecer a mis clientes internos y externos, además con el roadmap que nos brindan estoy segura que seguirá innovando cada vez

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.

It's pretty simple for agents to pick up quickly, it takes a bit longer for supervisors to get familiar with. QA tools are pretty barebones but functional enough. It can be as simple or complex as you need it to be, if you spend some time configuring the settings or working with Bright Pattern's support team to build out what you need.

Incentivized

I love that the Salesforce Service cloud provides all of the functionality that I need when implementing business processes for our customer support representatives. It even has enough functions and features that allow us to customize and expand upon our current processes, giving us the ability to go above and beyond what we've thought we could ever do. Using cases coupled with Salesforce's automation tools help ease the workload and keeps our data integrity intact.

Incentivized

It is always on. The only outage to date that I have experienced was with an upstream telco provider a few years ago. The inbound leg telco was hit by a DDOS attack which led to delays in routing calls to the platform. This was not the fault of the Bright Pattern platform but the telco provider. We have had a few minor carrier issues with call quality, or a handful of brief drops, but Bright Pattern is quick to identify these and change carriers when it starts to happen.

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

All pages load when expected, and reports render either in the web browser or as a download. I never really have issues with accessing the admin or agent desktop sites. It just works.

Incentivized

Load times can be slow, but this is also based on how much customization you have done. We added a lot of custom fields which could cause additional slowness in loading. This was never anything that affected our overall efficiency. I did not notice that Service Cloud slowed down any of the systems we had it integrated with

Incentivized

People are accessible. You are able to talk to the relevant subject matter experts that can address your specific problem. Everyone we deal with comes across as knowledgeable in their field and where they cannot solve specific problem they put you in contact with someone that can. You never feel like you are just a number even though you might be a small client or partner.

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.

In-person and virtual training was great, but Bright Pattern could use some online training videos similar to other platforms. I would welcome online training videos to keep the steady flow of new agents up to date. Admin training is one of the largest areas that need video. The static documentation is great. It is pretty easy to follow and configure your contact center as you progress through each step. The documentation is available online on an easy to use knowledgebase or wiki style site. You do not need a user account to access the help docs, meaning that users at any level can freely access the materials to learn about the platform.

Incentivized

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

Online training is documentation based only. It is thorough and step by step, but no videos. It would also be helpful to have more information within the help docs on custom reporting. I find that many of the Bright Pattern specific configurations for the Jasper Reporting Server have to be "stumbled" across through existing report templates and they are not clearly listed out somewhere. In person training will not generally go into great depth on report customizations.

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

As an implementor, I have found the Bright Pattern Contact Center very easy to work with. The platform operates in the manner which I think. Therefore, everything I do seems logical and works exactly as expected. Many solutions are much more difficult to work with and make implementations difficult

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

Bright Pattern offers many more options for scalability and the pricing is always best. The agent desktop and quick support is supirior in many ways but more importantly for us the price is best all while offering the same features and in some cases even more than its competitors

Zendesk - I think it's not exactly user-friendly for the final user, but it's user-friendly for the configuration. So it's easier to manage when we have these amounts of data we're going through and it's more AI prepared. So by far Salesforce is more ready for what we want as the next level of hyper-personalization in sales and for sales.

Incentivized

Very flexible and will scale without any intervention from my team. Scaling at the carrier/telco layer is handled by Bright Pattern, if you use their offered telecom

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

• Bright Pattern Contact Center' reliability has allowed us to improve the overall SLA we offer
• Bright Pattern Contact Center has allowed us to win business that we could not have done with other platforms
• Bright Pattern Contact Center has enabled us to expand our product offering into new market spaces.

• Positive, absolutely the speed to market and being able to get the product out there. The continuous improvement that we've been able to deliver in terms of small incremental developments, moving from basically a more rigid homegrown solution that they had where the turnaround time was about six monthly releases. We've got it down to three monthly releases of hoping to go to one month releases very soon. So just that whole speed to market being government, I mean that is just a major improvement in terms of what they've been able to do.
• I think the negative part was integrating it and the complexity we had in terms of integrating DevOps as a concept and being able to use the Salesforce DevOps tools to be able to get that all rolled out in their existing current, very structured and rigid environment. And that probably took us a solid year to get those processes up and running. But yeah, now that it's working, it's absolutely fabulous.

Incentivized