Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…
$20
per user/per month
Oracle Fusion Service
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Service Cloud is the help desk and customer experience management platform from Oracle. The technology was developed and supported by RightNow Technologies as RightNow CX for cloud-based call center automation, until that company's acquisition by Oracle in 2011 for about $1.5 billion.
Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.
Oracle Service [(formerly Oracle Service Cloud)] is well suited for cross-channel contact center service which includes live chats, virtual assistants, email support and case management. It has a social tool that keeps tabs on your customer interactions within your social media platforms and your website. You can provide your customers with a knowledge base for self-service with information that they need by posting content and resources.
Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
The email newsletter.
They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.
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.
Trying to group tickets is a bit unflexible. You can create folders which can be part of a workflow (automatic trigger) but you can't create a folder based on tags. This needs to be improved because there's a need to create smarter segments and mix them.
Metrics are useful but there needs to be more details about them. You can drill down in some but others are still not very actionable or visible (ok, that number went down, but what was the cause? what's the criteria with what you measure that?)
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.
We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.
Although RightNow is extremely flexible, the flexibility comes with a price. It is often not intuitive which settings you need to change (and under which menus these setting are buried) to enable the system to do what you want. Also, sometimes the system can do things you need, but you don't initially realize it. When RightNow sells a system to a new customer, I think it should come with X hours of consulting time with a RightNow expert. The customer should be able to consult with this expert over the next year to get advice concerning how to configure the system to achieve desired needs. Often RightNow Support would just answer "no" when I asked if I could do something, but then I would find another way to achieve my goals after talking with other companies using RightNow.
It is simple and intuitive. I haven't run into difficulty using any of the features that I have wanted to use. Additional help in the form of documentation or support is available as needed, and their response times are pretty good :)
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 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.
The vendor offers customer support to users who maybe stuck in usage of the platform in a number of options and this ensures that one does not get frustrated at all in using the platform. This enhances the trust held by the clients concerning Oracle CX Service [(formerly Oracle Service Cloud)].
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.
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
Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs well. Minimal usage of other programs, but have no need to explore alternatives at this time.
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.
We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.
We have an internal chargeback for servers and we anticipate that the cloud will save us some money or be cost neutral for us.
We plan to see a reduction in the need for data center staff and server provisioning as we move more environments to the cloud.
We are now responsible for our own destiny with the ability to ramp up and down our servers based on need. We can also monitor our costs more closely with the metered service and turn off the environments when we are not using them.
