Likelihood to Recommend We expereienced an upgrade by Aptean in March 2014 and it actually created issues with our interfaces to Word and well as performance issues. As of November, we have most of the performance issues resolved, however our interface with Word is still not working. It takes alot of upfront work to convert with Word and with the upgrade that was affected. Authors are still frustrated with many issues in the formatting and editing of existing data. A vital tool to update the product home pages has not been available except for sporadic late night periods since the upgrade in March. Overall, many authors are not happy with this knowledge management tool
Read full review This is great for cold calling and starting clients from scratch. A lot of entry is required to build a customer profile, but if you are diligent in entering this information, then it can be extremely useful, and you will thank yourself down the road for having an organized database with as many or few details stored. It is a little more challenging for existing customers who have a wealth of information on their files because the transfer of information can be quite tedious.
Read full review Pros Aptean offers simple access to Knowledge Management for our Clients, Customer Support teams as well as internal support teams. Allows our knowledge management team the ability to provide consistent and up-to-date processes and troubleshooting tips for our associates as well as ADP Clients. Aptean provides an easy to use user interface with tools for authors that mimic Microsoft Word (Cut, Paste, Spell Check, Bullets, Indentation etc). It also provides an easy to user user interface for our associates in accessing the Knowledge Management solutions. The Search tool is very powerful and allows the users quick access to the information they need! In the more than 3 years that we have been using Consona/Aptean, we have had very little down time. This is important to our authors as well as end users in being able to access the information. Allowing the authors the ability to update the information in near real time is another key feature of keeping our information current. Read full review 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 Read full review Cons We have experienced some slowness with importing pictures into our Aptean application. While they do eventually complete, it is very timeconsuming when several images are needed. Definitely tries our patience, or consider not including them at all! Some of the formatting issues transfering our information from Word to Aptean are still challenging and require too much manual intervention than necessary. Read full review Incredibly complex to set up and configure. Multiple points of potential failure. Things Desk.com did out-of-the-box require customized code and components in Service Cloud. Front-facing community is extremely difficult to configure and comes with many limitations. No help is provided by Salesforce without expensive Premiere Support plans. Expensive! Hidden costs and development costs are going to make Service Cloud far more expensive than almost any other Help Desk provider out there. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Many business units are using the Aptean product for knowledge management and a change now would be too crucial to the processes that the associates are becoming familiar with using. We have spent a lot of time promoting our Aptean Knowledge Management tool and interfaced it with our call tracking system.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Salesforce has a more than 99% uptime rate and Salesforce Service Cloud is no exception. I have never had any issues experiencing outages or service degradation when it comes to using the Service Cloud product (that I can remember). Always reliable and easy to use, I would recommend this product as your go-to for helpdesk, service desk, incident management, call center, and other business process needs.
Read full review Performance There are issues with page load performance and database performance for sure, but we are a very complex setup with a lot of automation and processing for 2000+ users so this is not surprising. We are also global, so the issue with distance from the regional servers is a problem.
Read full review Support Rating It depends on what support package you buy from Salesforce. That can be good or bad. It's highly flexible to your needs pricing wise. If you have devs on staff then don't buy support. If you don't, then sfdc offers support for a cost.
Read full review Implementation Rating We are still working through issues with the implementation. Things are also always changing so the original implementation required many changes
Read full review Alternatives Considered Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and
Freshdesk . It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
Read full review Return on Investment Increased Employee Effciency adding ability to look up processes and troubleshooting tips is invaluable. Ability to share information with our Client Facing interface, which results in better customer service. Encouraging ADP associates and clients to become more self sufficient is what we're all about! Ability to keep the information current with the effciency of the product. Read full review Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation. The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features Limited to annual subscription model Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots