ConnectWise PSA vs. Oracle Service

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

Oracle Right (Oracle Service Cloud) was an important evolution in the group's ombudsman channel management processes. We brought the Oracle Service Cloud to digitize the processes for capturing and managing the group's ombudsman channel, no longer operating manually (MS Excel).

Oracle Service Cloud (Right Now) brought about an important evolution in the management processes of the group's ombudsman channel, where activities that were performed manually, repetitively and with risk of errors, are now operated by the Right Now platform itself, whether by API, or by automation of the tool.

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.

• Oracle Service cloud handles incident management extremely well. It can accept requests from multiple channels. That includes email, website, phone, chat, SMS & some social.
• Oracle Service cloud provides a knowledge base that can be used by customers or by agents. It can move consumers to self service for most issues. It also has good feedback from customers and agents so that the knowledge can continue to be updated to push people to more self service.
• Oracle has a good consumer portal that can be used as a website or typically is used in conjunction with a main website as a contact center or help center site. This allows the contact center to manage both the knowledge and the request and the interactions with the customers.
• Oracle Service cloud is built to provide a turn key solution for CRM/Contact center with some minor configuration. But it also has the ability to be highly customized to meet any companies needs. Much of that work can be done via the configuration options already in the system. It also have a full set of SOAP and Rest APIs for integrating to other systems.

• 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.

Incentivized

• This is only an occasional, user problem; when searching for specific records, at times we receive an error that the maximum size has been exceeded and therefore does not yield any results. This is particularly frustrating when trying to search for a specific street address across several years.
• I found OPA challenging to use.

Incentivized

The product works awesomely. The only factors holding back a 10 star rating are some of the upgrades that I believe are necessary. Namely, active directory integration for the customer portal is a feature that is long overdue. AD integration on the technician side should also be made available for subscribers of the cloud hosted solution.

Incentivized

I give this rating to RightNow because I believe that it's a strong CRM (I know RightNow doesn't like this term) product with virtually limitless possibilities. I like how flexible RightNow is, allowing businesses to fully customize it for their needs. I also like that it's cloud based and doesn't require additional local installation and management.

ConnectWise has been great for our help desk. Over the years we have used it (5+), it has responded to community-sourced feedback and improved its product. I have always appreciated the support given when required, and overall the program has helped our service desk to become more efficient. The automated aspect, including workflow rules, has been an important part of our overall systems. When considering a help desk PSA, ConnectWise should not be overlooked.

Incentivized

The learning curve is fairly steep; but for something that has this much capability, it's nearly impossible to make it "easy". The layout and organization are at least reasonably intuitive. The hardest part-- the "weakest link"-- is the portal development (where you can build help centers and other end-user pages.) The capabilities there are significant, but the learning curve for that part is especially steep and it takes a fair amount of expertise to be able to update it.

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

We have never had issues with downtime or it not being available. Upgrades and maintenance also happens in weekends or at night.

Incentivized

Overall, I love CW Manage. I think it is a great platform, but nothing is learned from saying "You're great!" So I will share 2 issues where I think improvement can be made. 1. There are times where service requests are closed inappropriately without explanation or warning which can be frustrating. I have learned that I must work extra hard to manage my open issues to ensure that they don't just disappear without resolution. 2. I recently found that I had mistakenly been charged $50 a month for a year for services I did not have. When I brought this to CW's attention, I was quickly given a credit memo and an apology, which was nice, but it was still annoying

Incentivized

We use a lot of tabs and fields on our incident workspace, which should slow the system down, but it's still quite fast, and we continue to optimize whatever is possible.

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

Technicians seem to be assessed based solely on how quickly they close the issues. I've had to reopen requests multiple times because they didn't actually solve my problem. Also, when the issue has even a moderate amount of complexity, the technicians often instruct me to "open another SR" to handle the other issue. I'm the customer, I shouldn't have to follow their processes, they should handle that for me. But even when I create the new SR, it seems like their right hand isn't talking to their left - they aren't reading back to the previous issue for context. So I get bounced around a lot, and I have to tell them how to do their job

Incentivized

Most of our training was given while doing user acceptance testing, and getting the system approved by the market. When ever we were in doubt, our implementer helped us along. Later on we started exploring by our selves.

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

Thoroughly review the training at ConnectWise University BEFORE starting. Ask questions to other partners - there is a huge community that is more than willing to help. Lastly, I recommend getting ConnectWise Consulting to help - it's a BIG product, and the money you spend on consulting will pay for itself by helping you and your team get off to a running start (in the right direction)

Incentivized

Work with a RightNow expert during the implementation. Explain features that would you like to have. Often, somebody who really knows the system can show you what you need to do to achieve the desired results. Where a RightNow support engineer or a consultant might say "the system can't do that," a RightNow application engineer will listen to what you need, and often come up with an alternate path to achieve it

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.

TCS' customers who also selected Oracle Service Cloud over Salesforce Service Cloud and GE's ServiceMax in the Mfg. vertical in which I work, did so because of the robust ability of Oracle Service Cloud and its APIs to integrate with other value-add solutions for manufacturers such as IoT applications, Big Data Analytics, and Field Service applications.

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

We have never had any down time, slowness or anything. Any error or instability that has occurrred has so far has been caused by user errors.

Incentivized

• Faster compilation of Business Review material
• For larger customers, the dashboarding has helped our customers to remain sticky and add services/revenue to our MSP. They want to add more fragments of their IT for the 1 pane rollup.
• From a leadership perspective, BG has allowed me to make difficult staffing decisions with confidence. Detailed metric driven decisions on who is hitting KPIs/who isn't - as well as when data proved we were overstaffed and understaffed.

Incentivized

• Automation of campaigns across different channels of communication gives us an overview of our efforts and further boost how we engage our customers
• The email support help us reach a large number of customer within a short period of time simplifying customer support workflow
• Attracting more leads and converting them to become potential customers

Incentivized