Knova vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

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

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

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

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.

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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