LiveAgent vs. Parature (Discontinued)

I think [LiveAgent] is great from a customer service perspective, though I don't know that I would recommend it for B2B purposes. It has so many features that are fantastic as far as creating a great customer experience goes, I just think it is far more geared toward B2C than B2B.

Parature earns a "7" on my rating scale because it fits the bill for a ticketing solution. While it is not the most powerful utility I have come across, it is fairly user friendly and gets the job done. There is quite a bit of room for customizing the interface, but it comes with a learning curve. A score of "7" reflects what I would tell anyone who is looking for feedback on this application; it's better than a majority of the market share, but still has room to grow!

Incentivized

• It's a complete OMNI channel. You can configure all communication medium for your customer with LiveAgent i.e. Ticketing, Social Media, Phone, and Chat.
• Low on pricing.
• You can easily setup LiveAgent for your organization. You don't need to be a technical expert to implement this.
• The user-friendly application.

Incentivized

• Syncs all support emails into cases that can the be prioritized, monitored, and tracked.
• Provides easy canned responses to common support questions helping save time.
• Provides live chat.

Incentivized

• Occasionally when "resolving" a ticket, the page will not load the full list of remaining tickets. However, the moment you scroll, the tickets appear so it's not too big of a deal, but I'd like to see that cleaned up. It does not always happen.
• When dialing a phone number, the format needs to be specific, i.e. +15125555555. We often receive phone numbers in the more traditional format, i.e. (512) 555-5555. The outgoing call will not work when pasted this way. I think it will get fixed. These little things seem to get sorted out after enough people complain about it.
• The mobile version has a few bugs, but when on the run, it at least allows you to read and respond to email. Examples of bugs include not being able to transfer the ticket to another department (on iOS the drop down menu functions like a text field for some reason so clicking into it selects the text as if you are going to copy and paste it). Also, the ability to add an admin note would be nice on the mobile version.

Incentivized

• Implementation- I think they have worked on improving this since we launched
• Custom requests
• Perhaps an interface with other business systems

Incentivized

I am giving this rating as Live Agent is a very good software that is essential to any small or big business that provides customer support services. It gives you the possibility to manage any of your clients issues, answer questions and keep a good relationship with them by providing quick solutions.

We left Parature for Salesforce Service Cloud. While Parature was functional, as our business matured we needed better support, more stability, and a lot more features. In addition, it integrated with our sales, marketing, and finance department, allowing us to all use a single solution and be able to share information across departments.

Incentivized

The initial setup, onboarding and training is easy. The system provides 2 graphic version of interfaces in black or white default colors. I would appreciate, if there were more. Some of the setup forms are not correctly resized. Overall, I'm always able to find what I am looking for in LiveAgent.

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 one time that I contacted the customer support at LiveAgent, they were very quick to help me out and the customer support representative walked me through every thing that I needed to know to set up what I needed. Over all, the support staff at LiveAgent were perfect.

Nothing ever seemed to get resolved

Incentivized

Implementation was quick and when not counting a bug on our website, it took a couple hours. It was mostly done on our end or with the assistance of LiveAgent's live chat support team. We recommend to check out LiveAgent's tutorial videos on their youtube channel or browsing their knowledge base - we've almost always found answers to our queries there.

bold360 worked for our basic purposes but it was pretty bare bones. It didn't give us the option to get sales or to translate from Spanish to English and it made things a bit more difficult. LiveAgent has the features that we needed and it has many of the similar options that we also still use.

Incentivized

Before choosing Parature we reviewed many of the currently available solutions before building our short list of Parature, SugarCRM, Zendesk, Salesforce, and NetSuite. In the end, the licensing models for Salesforce and Netsuite eliminated them from consideration. The SugarCRM solution was our current solution, and didn't appear to be a key area of focus for Sugar (though we continue to use SugarCRM for everything except the Ticketing feature). Zendesk lacked the Download Module feature which is a critical element of our deployment. In the end, it was Parature that addressed all of the needs we identified and did so in a single, hosted solution. It was also one of the least expensive to deploy and maintain.

Incentivized

• We are generating more sales by having sales representatives online chatting with customers.
• The customer service team is able to avoid answering the same guest on a number of platforms (ie. when a guest emails in, fills out a "contact form," and chats with a representative in live time in the span of ten minutes) because LiveAgent enables us to have all of our communication in one platform.

• Positive: everything is housed in one place, we are paperless and we are efficient.
• Negative: the bugs of this product make the above equally as frustrating. Also, some people don't use it correctly and going back and fixing their mistake is time-consuming. The reporting feature are also pretty flawed.

Incentivized