ConnectWise PSA vs. Engagor (discontinued) vs. Zoho Desk

BrightGauge lets us know when we have critical issues that need solving. A massive influx of tickets all at the same time triggers an investigation. Usually, it is tied to a server going down, which we can address. It would not be helpful for a small MSP or IT department with just a few daily tickets. The stats are better used to track a large amount of clients.

Incentivized

Engagor is a very powerful tool for customer care purposes to be able to engage in real-time with your customers. If there are a lot of messages coming in during important peaks throughout, we can easily answer them every 30 seconds.
Engagor isn’t that fit to use for publishing. We mostly use Engagor to reply to messages in real-time. However, for scheduling posts in Engagor, we publish and schedule on the native platform instead.

Zoho Desk is a great customer service tool. It is very easy to track the ability to receive tickets and send responses in Zoho Desk. There are lots of options for customization. The knowledge base feature is very extensive and powerful. It makes creating internal and external FAQs easy.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Real-time mention tracking is a must these days. Quick responsiveness is critical on many social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
• Fast and helpful support via Engagor chat and messages helps a LOT! I think the longest wait time was about 40 seconds for me. My workflow never gets disrupted because of idle sessions.
• Automations can help you a lot. Automated "recipes" are great tools for decreasing your agents' workload, and there are many customizable settings for them.

• It provides a simple widget code with a few clicks once you decide to integrate it with your website or application.
• There is a very user friendly dedicated mobile application for Zoho Desk for Android and IOS devices.
• You can easily track all of your tickets and agents from the dashboard interface.
• You can insert tags with each ticket to group them into specific categories for analysis and troubleshooting.

Incentivized

• Annual or more than annualized data is desperately needed for MSPs to show trends, current limitation is previous 240 days for ConnectWise tickets
• Alerts when datasets do not sync properly, I have to rely on my team to notice vs get an automated alert from BrightGauge
• Small thing, but it would be nice to have more options on the report scheduler to enable a start date. If you wish to do it quarterly, you have to start the schedule exactly 3 months from the next run.

Incentivized

• The UX is pretty clunky. Engagor only loads about 10 mentions per page, so if my team is behind on tagging/mention resolution by a couple of days, for a global brand that can mean an extra week of work. Would be much easier if the user could choose how many mentions show up on their screen.
• Over the year we have had issues with Engagor's glitches. For example, the user has the capability to publish to a platform (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) through Engagor as the brand. For a couple of the brands we work on, Engagor would show the update as published as one brand, but would actually publish as another. As an agency that handles social media content/community management for several very large brands, we cannot afford to have accidental status updates despite the author's efforts. This happened several times over the course of our experience with Engagor, to a point that we had to forego this feature for those brands and publish natively through the platform.
• It has definitely skewed reporting numbers more than once -- for a set time period (i.e. 30 days, our typical monthly reporting period), the stats for a platform will appear very different from how they display on the native platform itself. For example, on occasion Engagor would load numbers from a Facebook fan count during a 30-day period that did not at all match up with the numbers Facebook showed me. This also applies to the number of overall mentions of a brand/account.
• There is no immediately clear "undo" feature when resolving a mention. There have been times I have bulk-tagged a set of mentions, set all as resolved and then realized that I had made an error, without a very clear way to revert that action.
• Double mentions have shown up, skewing numbers and sentiment/tagging analytics.
• The insights/reporting section could definitely be a little more clear in how it explains metrics (or why the user should care to report these metrics). While we have an analyst on our team who is happy to explain these terms, I can see how some of them would not be intuitive at all to a user who doesn't live and breathe social media analytics. Also, the line graphs can be very difficult to read and parse. If the user downloads a line graph to their desktop from Engagor, it doesn't necessarily show all of the information you need, making it necessary to screengrab rather than downloading a higher-quality visual.

• The biggest drawback that I am facing while using the platform is that their ticketing system is not that great [in my opinion]. It does not give us the option to add sales tax and other charges in the invoices which leads to a big problem for us.
• [I feel] its customer support needs improvement.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Both the tool and the support that we receive from the customer service department and the customer success manager makes me likely to renew the use of Engagor.

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

Incentivized

I give [Zoho Desk] [an] overall usability score of 9. This is partly due to the search functionality needs improvement. There are several times where I am left unable to find a ticket and have to generate a new one. I am hoping in the future that they will make some changes!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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."

Incentivized

As Zoho Support is based in a different timezone to ours it can be an issue that we cannot get an immediate response to an issue. But I will say that once their Support is in the office they are fairly good to respond. they have resolved almost all issues I have told them about, but Zoho have also made system changes and not communicated these beforehand which means we are faced with something new and cannot get support on this until their support team is in the office

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Everyone but dynamics had holes in it. Dynamics is good, but it requires more development time. I spoke with some people that have CW and liked it. But when I inquired after our frustrations, I discovered they had a full time scheduling & logistics CW manager and the field people were using it purely like any other more simplistic ticket system. They said it would be impossible otherwise. The one big difference is the transparency of the sales effort. The other sales people were honest on the limitations or potential challenges and worked with us. They also worked with our agenda. At CW they don't have that option. The consulting time is eaten through a pre-formatted agenda which they communicate too you, not with you.

Sprout Social is good for smaller accounts with limited traffic. Some insights available but often questionable data. Only picks up direct interaction (i.e. doesn't monitor likes or favourites). Sysomos was used for a while, but spent ages defining search times still producing questionable data. Did not properly monitor Facebook interaction and often did not pick up from that platform at all. Customer service only operated in US time (we are UK) which proved increasingly problematic

We selected Zoho Desk as we needed a platform that was going to allow the business to grow through both usage and staffing numbers. We wanted something cost-effective but still offered standard features in an effective cloud-delivered solution but would still allow customization by our internal dev team, to derive better value from the service where it natively didn't do what we needed it to. FreeAgent was okay for a while, but Zoho Desk has allowed a vast improvement in our service offering to end customers.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• The positive impact is no one has to return to the office to look at notes - they can look up the support ticket on their laptop, tablet, or phone.
• The positive impact on ROI is keeping all of your support tickets organized in one spot and multiple techs can update them.
• The positive impact on ROI is that you have happier customers as you can update the support tickets no matter where you are at

Incentivized

• Better customer service.
• Better detection of potential crisis on social media which leads to avoiding the crisis or better managing it.

• Zoho Desk has created an organised sytem of support which alows me to help my customers more efficiently.
• By saving resolutions as articles, Zoho Desk has provided a training resource for current customers and support staff as part of solving problems.
• All new customers become part of a database of customers who continue to receive support and education from forums created by the articles and customer questions.

Incentivized