ClickDesk is an engagement platform offering live chat, video and social capabilities. ClickDesk also includes help desk functionality (ticket management, email support, alerts, etc.).
$16.99
per month
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels, including email, the web, chat or social media. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017. Former users are encouraged to migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
It was well suited for quick chats. Sometimes a topic over chat can be too complicated and requires a phone call which ClickDesk gives an option for a phone call. It is too specific and limited to conversations. The reason we moved away from this to Microsoft Teams is because Teams is a more all in one solution. It can do chat, phone calls as well as webinars and screen sharing.
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.
ClickDesk allows account managers to interact with leads and customers, as they are searching and researching on our website and in our e-commerce store.
It is compiled of amazing features of the live call, online engagement, communication, and interaction with users or clients on a very professional level.
I can easily contact any customer or client easily by just contacting them on the platform which automatically connects to the representative of the relevant area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As I mentioned earlier, these competitors are good but they are too complex to manage by a non-tech person. Before deciding to buy clickdesk we tried 4-5 other competitors. Intercom was pretty easy too but also had a considerably complex panel for agents. A few of our departments are not that computer savvy. So we had to pick the easiest service we could find.