Certinia PS Cloud vs. CustomerSuccessBox

PSA is great at capturing all the data you would need to accurately track and report on consulting projects. It captures project financials, calculates projected GM%, and (among others) allows for hourly tracking of employees, which breaks it up between billable and non-billable for utilization tracking to accurately understand costs. However, the user interface is tough to learn, and the stability of the data reporting functions is questionable. This tool would be great for smaller consulting shops that fit the standard contracting mold. If your business is fairly straightforward without a lot of shades of gray, you shouldn't have much trouble with the tool. However, if your business practices have a lot of exceptions based on clients, then you'll have a tall administrative task on your hands.

Incentivized

It is the best software if you are a b2b software who is planning to scale customer success department and you are running blind on potential threats for renewal. It also helps you understand which customer is not getting value out of your product. I completely recommend this. Go for it!!!!!

• The biggest strength of FinancialForce PSA is that it's built upon the force.com platform, which means it is very easily customizable to our business needs.
• Projects are easily created, as well as milestones and assignments.
• "Actuals" (dollars and hours) are calculated automatically, and are easily reported on.
• Resources are easily managed by using the Resource Planner
• FinancialForce PSA support is outstanding!

• Journey feature will help you automate your manual tasks like auto csm assignments, auto playbook enrolls, email alerts to your clients about new assignments or any set templates, etc.
• Making a playbook of your process (must be consist of multiple steps) will help you give the visibility of how many clients are stuck in which steps and from when.
• They are using Metabase for making analytics dashboards where you can make your own dashboard with different filters like Csm activity report, churn dashboard, potential clients report and also using pulse feature in Metabase schedule your daily report to different required people.

Incentivized

• The product is still maturing as a full featured PSA tool. The feature roadmap is compelling but is still being built out.
• Tool is ideal for managing a services business. It is not yet a project manager tool.
• Limited reporting
• Maturing change order process
• Limited integration to back-end financial systems beyond Financial Force Financials. We use Netsuite.
• The underlying SalesForce UI is constrained and can be keystroke intensive at times
• Limited archiving of historical data

• Health aggregation delay can be improved.
• Calling with csbox software can be improved, it makes touchpoint even if your call from csbox has not picked up, and accordingly changed relationship health.
• Add more analytics in the playbook like avg time taken to complete each step and there is no option of selecting multiple csms in the filter.

Incentivized

There is another PSA software program that we have been looking into (DreamFactory) that could potentially replace FinancialForce PSA in our organization. Like FinancialForce PSA, it is cloud based on the force.com platform. Licensing is slightly less than FinancialForce PSA, and the Resource Management tool is far superior to FinancialForce PSA. With that said, our renewal falls in Q4 2014 and I don't foresee us implementing a new system this fiscal year.

It is maturing and does what it does well although it is not fully complete.

Integration to SF is great.

Gives great visibility to incoming services projects and allows the staffing process to start on pipeline deals.

There are certain processes that take more click-throughs then needed so there are refinement opportunities around the UI.

The resource management screen and project status views have really matured since our original purchase, and while not perfect, allow business leaders to do their jobs.

Configurations vs. customizations. We seem to have to bring in an Apex developer to do a customization for changes I would think could be configuration settings

Customer success box is one of the best products we have used as it solves the main problem for us. Use tracking and adoption. The best part about various software integrations is that now we are able to track everything at one single platform with multiple reports, analytics and dashboards.

Incentivized

We have maybe had 1-2 outages over 3 years.

Most of the time it is fine. There are peak periods of usage where performance noticably slows down (i.e., Monday mornings when time is due and many reports are being run)

Every time I submit a new help request, whether it's an actual help request or just a question about FinancialForce PSA, I always feel that I'm receiving world class support. The support we receive from FinancialForce PSA is always very detailed and professional. There are some requests that take longer than other for the initial response, which is why I did not give a full 10.

I have created two - three support tickets so far and their response is very very quick. Their team is also very empathetic, understanding and highly motivated towards solving a customer's problem. I would definitely recommend and rate them 10 / 10 for their excellent after sales support. They support for all EST & PST zones.

It was fine.

Appirio did a good job, however, the user team didn’t know enough to make all the right configuration/customization choices. The team focused too much on replicating existing processes vs. reengineering them. In hindsight we should have had deep dive reviews at key milestones and enforced more focus on how the software would operate. We didn’t have access to true best practices expertise. In hindsight, a consultant from the outside would have been helpful to drive this.

FF PSA is a robust Project Management solution that can be configured to fits any size business. We have tried several other applications and PSA so far has met and exceeded our needs. We run our day to day operations on Salesforce so having a solution that is native was a must have. PSA met that requirement and much more.

Incentivized

CustomerSuccessBox provides a great UI where I can manage all the activities related to a client in a single window. This helps to update and focus on key tasks related to the client. Small insights graph helps to quickly analyze the client's health towards our product. The customizable filters are a great help in sorting the data.

Incentivized

• FinancialForce PSA has helped us improve our data tracking and allows us to get more granular about our financial information and performance.
• PSA has given more tools and reports to individual contributors to take greater ownership over their own data, and has increased accountability across the organization.
• PSA has added a fairly hefty administrative burden to individuals, project managers, and our financial team.

Incentivized

• It has helped in managing large amount of Client data under single platform.
• It helped in generating valuable insights from data.
• It is helpful to take proactive actions.