Issuetrak vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

If someone is looking for a ticket management system or something to keep track of records in a cloud environment, IssueTrak is well suited to handle this need. It's a very simple and basic approach and after using it for 10 years, it is still just as easy to find what I'm looking for on previous tickets from years ago. The setup can get a little bit of a challenge and if you have a need to segregate users/employees into their own areas for workflow, it can be a little daunting trying to get it just right. Where I feel that IssueTrak falls short is if you need to keep track of CUSTOM FIELDS (fields that you input as searchable and trackable information) in the Dashboard area, where you spend most of your time looking to see what your workload and flow are like, is very limited, requiring you to dig a little further for what you want to see. Also, no ability to input physical addresses / GPS coordinates to be displayed on some sort of real-time map is also missing and could really boost what IssueTrak has to offer.

Incentivized

I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.

Incentivized

• Keeps expansive records over a large period of time.
• Provides a simple way to look at your workload with dashboards.
• Can be used on a company level with employees, but also can be set up to have customer interaction.
• Additional modules are handy as well (Inventory tracking, Surveys, etc.)

Incentivized

• Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
• The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
• Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.

Incentivized

• No place to physically MAP out your tickets (IE: Google Maps / Address Fields / GPS coordinates).
• Dashboards and ticket items do not update in real-time, making users need to REFRESH to for the latest updates/dashboards.
• Mobile app not as good as the desktop experience, especially for Dashboard views.
• Can be a bit complicated to setup and get going. Segregation of departments / users can also be a little on the complex side.
• Dashboards could GREATLY use the ability to display and track CUSTOM fields for quicker access to the information you want the most.

Incentivized

• We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.

Incentivized

IssueTrak is good at what it does, but we really needed some expanded functionality out of it that just hasn't organically happened. Having a 'real-time' update of Dashboards and tickets is a piece that is lacking, especially as our organization continues to grow. A lot of times you go to update a ticket and find out it has been altered/closed before you even hit the submit button. Being able to make charts/graphs of custom fields for Dashboard is a feature (that I feel) is long overdue. Also, the ability to capture address information / GPS coordinates to be displayed on a live map is also a feature we really wanted to see.

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.

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.

Incentivized

Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.

Incentivized

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

They were always very good at getting a timely answer to any questions I had and in cases where I actually needed support to step in and help, they always delivered. I was very happy with the support I received from them.

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

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

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

IssueTrak shines for basic ticket management and the format in which they display all the information is very well done. I'd highly recommend it to someone that is looking at trying to track information at a ground level (just starting out). While other solutions are not perfect by any means, we just find that it is lacking some key features that we had hoped would have been implemented over the years (IE: More flexibility with Dashboard reporting and custom fields, a way visually look at addresses and GPS coordinates on a display map, more of a real-time approach with data and completion, etc.) This need caused us to look at some other solutions that may fit the bill a little better in the future.

Incentivized

We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.

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

• Made tracking individual service changes, adds, deletions, and trouble-ticket very easy to manage.
• We migrated from a paper-based work order system to completely digital and online, thus cutting down on a lot of unneeded printouts.
• Was able to actually validate and see the performance of users and what they were contributing to the department on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in terms of work performance.

Incentivized

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized