ETO Software (legacy) vs. Kissflow

I can see from an education perspective how it would be an incredible fit. The functionality is all there and growing. From a CAC perspective, it's still a work in progress, especially for larger CACs where lots more services are provided and the lines between programs blur a bit more. I think that ETO is becoming more user-friendly for CACs and Social Solutions is moving in the right direction too. I can't wait for some of the new features to roll out and be able to use them in our system. I really do think that will improve our user experience significantly.

Incentivized

KiSSFLOW is well suited for any information heavy paperwork that multiple people approve and have access to complete work. It is less suited for processes that require a lot of back and forth with a form initiator. The workflows like to be very linear without much back tracking. It can do that but it prefers to be forward linear.

• ETO captures the variety of data that can give us more ways to understand what is happening with the participants we serve.
• Participant dashboards are customizable and can be very helpful for direct service providers in serving their participants.
• The referral system within ETO allows us to make easier referrals between programs and track how often that occurs.
• It doesn't take a strong technical person to set up programs and other pieces within ETO.

Incentivized

• I appreciate the automatic email notifications when it is your turn to complete a task. This keeps everyone on track.
• I appreciate being able to "reassign" a task as well--leaving flexibility for some folks to cover for others when needed.
• I appreciate the personal check-ins from our rep, asking how things are going. That makes me feel like someone is paying attention and wants me to be happy with the product.

Incentivized

• ETO needs to be mobile friendly because a lot of our staff do outreach work, including all touchpoints, demographics, enrollments, and dashboards on their phone.
• Too many ways to get to the same thing. E.g. Add New Participant Tab, Add New Participant in Navigation Bar, Add New Participant on Home Page, etc. This generates mistakes and a need for very thorough training and tight oversight.
• Inability to remove touchpoints from custom universes once they have already been added. There is a limit of 20 touchpoints per custom universe. If the touchpoints in a universe have become obsolete or irrelevant, there is no way to make room for a new, more relevant touchpoint. Old touchpoints can be disabled but not removed.
• Need to pay extra for email and calendar notifications. This should be a built-in function, as the software already costs a lot, and many organizations cannot afford to spend more to get this vital functionality.
• It would be great if a "Case Conference" chat feature could be attached to participants. Case managers could enter the chat room and relay important information about the participant to each other. This could also work when people aren't there in real time, like emails. The important part is that all of this information would be accessible UNDER the participant's profile or dashboard that it's regarding.

Incentivized

• Learning. If you are coming from a 100% paper process and have employees who know nothing more, then there is definitely a learning curve. You will need to bring someone in to help you train employees on the core concept of the change (the "Why are we doing this" questions). KiSSFLOW does have support, but this is more getting down to the details in your own work environment.
• Visual learners will love it, but not non-visual. If you are an accountant, and your brain works like an accountant, then this program will be difficult to learn. It is very visual, and I have seen more success with visual learners than any others.
• Bugs. A few years ago, there were a lot of bugs. There are not that many anymore. This is to be expected with any program, so if you are training an impatient staff who doesn't do well with error messages, you will want to be sure to pad the training sessions. I have not seen error messages in a long time; however, the nature of the beast is that you won't see one until you actually find one...

Incentivized

Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool

Incentivized

Really love the product. Was pleasantly surprised that it has been easy to use for parents

Incentivized

6 years of experience dealing with a poor interface, unreliable reports, and broken promises with virtually zero improvements. I have too many issues to list but have an entire file if anyone ever shows interest from a site Manager. I listed some of the issues in some of the first questions in this review and I appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences.

The system has room to grow as it's limited by not being able to edit POs after they've been approved. The system is great for registrations and syncing to other systems while including the attachments. The reporting from Kissflow is also easy to setup to link to other platforms such as Looker

Incentivized

Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.

Incentivized

Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.

Incentivized

We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)

Incentivized

I haven't encountered a need for support with KiSSFLOW. It's not a perfect platform, but it's functional, dependable, and reasonably intuitive. I can't fault a support team just because their product works!

Incentivized

Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.

Incentivized

Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.

Incentivized

We originally built our program around SharePoint and were dissatisfied by the lack of transparency it provided. We then moved to ETO, primarily because it was the cheapest of the other solutions that we looked at. Now, we are realizing that we are not getting any real value from our ETO system, so we will likely be investing in a more sophisticated system.

Incentivized

KiSSFLOW wants you to be able to increase productivity, make it possible to "manage the chaos" (their own words) and simply make things better. It is exactly what it sounds like. For a visual learner, KiSSFLOW is perfect. It really does make good on its promise to help you manage the chaos, and it makes it easy for your employees to understand how your business works. More specifically, I recommended this program for a small school that had never automated anything. They knew nothing about the process. Bringing in KiSSFLOW allowed them to not only refine their process, but it gave awareness to other employees and ensure that they could work as a team, knowing the intricacies of how each department works (so, the Director would understand the many steps of Admissions before taking over after enrollment -- they would know what each family experienced).

Incentivized

The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.

Incentivized

• It has saved us time in terms of putting together reports for internal use and for external funders.
• Better accountability for gathering information.
• Given the monthly cost of the system we are probably paying too much but the cost of switching to another piece of software doesn't quite justify a move yet.

Incentivized

• Somewhat expensive compared to other cheap (or free) task management alternatives. ROI depends on your specific needs and the size of your organization.
• ROI can be ambiguous since KiSSFLOW is primarily for internal company use. A simple email thread could accomplish many of the same things, but with less efficiency.

Incentivized