ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) is a business management platform for companies that sell, service, and support technology. The platform is cloud-based and integrates automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics. It is the hub of the ConnectWise suite.
$35
Per Tech Per Month
ProProfs Help Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
ProProfs Help Desk is a customer support tool that promises to help agents track and resolve customer-care-related issues. The cloud-based software aims to enable businesses to deliver a delightful customer experience. This becomes possible with faster and effective ticket resolution. Key benefits and capabilities include: Timely resolution of customer queries: Customers feel delighted with timely responses. ProProfs help desk ticketing system allows managers and system…
You absolutely need a full time individual on this program to manage it properly. It is likely a powerful application. However, you have to know how all the disparate parts interact with the other content in the application. How they actually interface with your businesses operation applications (really check this one out as it only seems to play nice with Microsoft suites based on our experience.) and decide how much time and additional money you are willing to bury into this. Figure at least 2x over CW cost your initial period of out-of-pocket costs
As this tool is an affordable option, this help desk software is best suited for startups to deal with their customer base and build customer-centric brand value. This helps in not only helped me increase customer loyalty but also ensured customer retention, increasing my company’s profits substantially. But, this tool does have a few minor drawbacks. The most important feature, for me, that is missing from this tool is skill-based routing. Without this feature, our agents lose a lot of time in replying to just one customer question. Sometimes, the ticket needs to be reassigned to a specialized agent - and until they are available, the ticket remains open.
Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.
Sometimes customers ask questions that require more than one agent to look into the matter. For such situations, ProProfs Help Desk has the “child ticket” feature. This literally made my life so so easy! Whenever I was in this situation, all I had to do was create a child ticket and assign it to another agent and give him a heads up on what has been going on. Answering a customer’s question accurately becomes really easy with this feature.
Our entire team’s performance was always static. We never knew how anyone was performing or was anyone making any difference in the overall company’s value. With this tool, it became easy to see how every agent is performing and whether there was any positive impact on both - the company and our current customer base.
I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
Better Knowledge base section.
We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.
This tool does route tickets, but the one drawback is that the tickets are;t assigned to a specialized agent. It is randomly assigned to any available agent, and if he doesn’t have expertise in terms of the customer question, it becomes hard to give an accurate answer.
Giving automatic responses to customers makes our life easy, but we can’t personalize these messages. This sometimes makes our customers feel that they are talking to a bot, making it difficult to answer their questions without them having a hostile reaction to the automated answers.
ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer tickets, account information, sales pipeline, and HR.
I shifted from Kayako to ProProfs Help Desk for mainly two reasons, UI and features. ProProfs Help Desk definitely has a more user-friendly interface and the features offered by this tool are also more compared to Kayako. A few features that aren’t available in Kayako but are available in ProProfs Help Desk are multiple shared inboxes, private notes, and email ticketing.
ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
