Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review This is great for cold calling and starting clients from scratch. A lot of entry is required to build a customer profile, but if you are diligent in entering this information, then it can be extremely useful, and you will thank yourself down the road for having an organized database with as many or few details stored. It is a little more challenging for existing customers who have a wealth of information on their files because the transfer of information can be quite tedious.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Incredibly complex to set up and configure. Multiple points of potential failure. Things Desk.com did out-of-the-box require customized code and components in Service Cloud. Front-facing community is extremely difficult to configure and comes with many limitations. No help is provided by Salesforce without expensive Premiere Support plans. Expensive! Hidden costs and development costs are going to make Service Cloud far more expensive than almost any other Help Desk provider out there. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Salesforce has a more than 99% uptime rate and Salesforce Service Cloud is no exception. I have never had any issues experiencing outages or service degradation when it comes to using the Service Cloud product (that I can remember). Always reliable and easy to use, I would recommend this product as your go-to for helpdesk, service desk, incident management, call center, and other business process needs.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review There are issues with page load performance and database performance for sure, but we are a very complex setup with a lot of automation and processing for 2000+ users so this is not surprising. We are also global, so the issue with distance from the regional servers is a problem.
Read full review Support Rating 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."
Read full review It depends on what support package you buy from Salesforce. That can be good or bad. It's highly flexible to your needs pricing wise. If you have devs on staff then don't buy support. If you don't, then sfdc offers support for a cost.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review We are still working through issues with the implementation. Things are also always changing so the original implementation required many changes
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and
Freshdesk . It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation. The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features Limited to annual subscription model Read full review ScreenShots ConnectWise PSA Screenshots Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots