ClientSuccess vs. DukeNet vs. Zuora

ClientSuccess is perfect for the growing small-to-medium business like ours. It's simple and easy enough to quickly implement as a starter solution, but also robust enough to support multiple Customer Success teams. It may fall a bit short in terms of an enterprise organization in scale, customization, and flexibility. However, I can see enterprise organizations using different instances of ClientSuccess, perhaps for different departments or sections, if those organizations didn't need overarching analytics

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Pulse - It is so nice to collect the pulses of my client to know if they are healthy or not. I base a lot of my interactions with clients off of pulse. It shows me how many days it's been since I last had a pulse check on someone and from there I can see if I need to reach out or not.
• Automated Emails - It's so comforting to know that my clients are being communicated to when I haven't thought to reach out to them. I have set up a lot of automated emails and rules for when they should go out and I've had a lot of clients get in touch with me from it that need.
• Success Cycles - It has allowed me to set up success cycles for the clients. Because of this, I know exactly how to train them and exactly where they're at in the training process.

• 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.

Incentivized

• The support view takes a few steps to get to the meat and potatoes.
• The success score model can be improved to include smaller one-off campaigns. Success score is good for a campaign that has existed for a while but not for the one-off projects.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They are SUPER responsive...even for late night inquiries.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.

Incentivized

It was reliable.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Our team had previously been using HubSpot CRM as a way to manage client contracts in combination with Trello for simple client progress mapping, and Client Success has eliminated the need to use either of them for client management. HubSpot is designed more for sales processes and was missing a way for our team to get an accurate view of our clients and their details. In a similar manner, Trello is designed more for task and project management and didn't provide the detail orientation we needed.

Incentivized

Briefly evaluated BillingPlatform during routine vendor review but decided to stay with Zuora. I don't really have any insights; I just wanted to understand other players and see how Zuora stacked up in the competitive landscape. Prior to the implementation of Zuora, we used a homegrown legacy system that the Company outgrew.

Incentivized

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

Incentivized

• Within the first week, leadership was able to have more visibility into the lifestage and health score of each client
• We needed to become more proactive as an organization and this platform has allowed us to do so with real-time metrics and reporting.
• We needed to find a way to scale our approach, especially as our Client Success organization continues to grow, and this is already helping.

• Positive impact: we're able to invoice our customers timely and correctly.
• Positive impact: recurring payments are simple and accurate.
• Negative impact: Zuora and the Customer Management System that my organization use are no longer integrated because of some issues in the past with double billing and things of that nature.

Incentivized