Helpshift vs. Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)

If you need a good way for players to send in support tickets that propagates in real-time, Helpshift would be a service I'd recommend.

Incentivized

The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.

Incentivized

• Their customer support is very responsive. If they have any problems, they fix them quickly.
• They are constantly trying to improve and expand their offering, which is beneficial to our growing company.
• It is very user-friendly and easy to manage. The analytics are pretty good as well.

Incentivized

• Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
• Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
• Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.

Incentivized

• While I am not an engineer; it is known that Helpshift can be a bit of a pain to get it implemented into our applications.
• There are some issues with the badge when it comes to the notifications of messages that let the user know they have a reply from customer service.
• The website dashboard that is used to respond to customers has trouble sometimes and is very slow.

Incentivized

• Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
• The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
• Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
• The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
• It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.

Incentivized

Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative

Incentivized

Helpshift is really easy to use and set up. We enjoy the automation to automatically route certain issues to different smart folders. There's just a lot of flexibility in the functionality to make things work for our team in the best way. I didn't give it a 10/10 just because we need SMS/Apple Business Chat and Helpshift doesn't yet offer that. They also don't currently support social media channels but they are working on releasing that soon.

Incentivized

It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.

Incentivized

They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.

Incentivized

The few times we've had to contact them, they were courteous and gave us the information we needed swiftly.

Incentivized

Nothing ever seemed to get resolved

Incentivized

Zendesk is used for customer communication via email and Helpshift is used for chat, they are for the same purpose but with different response times.

There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs

Incentivized

• The ability to properly organize and delegate work to customer service representatives has been a very positive ROI after using Helpshift.
• The customer service reps are much happier with this system over the previous system of a general company email address and other CS software tools.

Incentivized

• Parature allows for better Customer Service
• Can follow up automatically for tickets
• Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to.
• Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed.

Incentivized