ETO Software (legacy) vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

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

Probably where you have a number of service teams that all contribute to a knowledge base is one area that's really useful. AI response, it looks like with AgentForce, that's going to be one of our next deployments. So they're AI based on the trust layer is, I like that it has the trust layer because it's already got some built in safeguards around privacy and security controls for AI, which is very important right now. Where it's probably less useful:gain, round robining a very email heavy conversation, so it's not the best email tool. A lot of our team still uses Gmail and logs to the case rather than actually emailing directly out of Salesforce. Email signatures are not great because you can only have plain text email signatures, you can't have HTML.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

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

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

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

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.

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.

I love that the Salesforce Service cloud provides all of the functionality that I need when implementing business processes for our customer support representatives. It even has enough functions and features that allow us to customize and expand upon our current processes, giving us the ability to go above and beyond what we've thought we could ever do. Using cases coupled with Salesforce's automation tools help ease the workload and keeps our data integrity intact.

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

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

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

Load times can be slow, but this is also based on how much customization you have done. We added a lot of custom fields which could cause additional slowness in loading. This was never anything that affected our overall efficiency. I did not notice that Service Cloud slowed down any of the systems we had it integrated with

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

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

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

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

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

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

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

Zendesk - I think it's not exactly user-friendly for the final user, but it's user-friendly for the configuration. So it's easier to manage when we have these amounts of data we're going through and it's more AI prepared. So by far Salesforce is more ready for what we want as the next level of hyper-personalization in sales and for sales.

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

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

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

• Positive, absolutely the speed to market and being able to get the product out there. The continuous improvement that we've been able to deliver in terms of small incremental developments, moving from basically a more rigid homegrown solution that they had where the turnaround time was about six monthly releases. We've got it down to three monthly releases of hoping to go to one month releases very soon. So just that whole speed to market being government, I mean that is just a major improvement in terms of what they've been able to do.
• I think the negative part was integrating it and the complexity we had in terms of integrating DevOps as a concept and being able to use the Salesforce DevOps tools to be able to get that all rolled out in their existing current, very structured and rigid environment. And that probably took us a solid year to get those processes up and running. But yeah, now that it's working, it's absolutely fabulous.

Incentivized