Oracle Siebel CRM vs. Zuora

As an end user, I would not recommend this solution for enterprise deployment. Lack of support for modern browsers, slow performance, and poor searchability - these things set Siebel CRM in the rear of the pack. There was no great mobile solution either, so that can be bothersome especially for road warriors like myself.

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Zuora is great for smaller subscription businesses that have a limited number of simple or basic products. As more products are added to the catalog, the ability to report on specific product performance has become more challenging. Similarly, as our number of customers has grown significantly over the past few years, the extraction of data through export files is more of a challenge to capture all data points.

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• Great data model: the out of the box version comes with standard objects that support most of the industries business models: Finance, Communications, Utilities, Public Sector, Life Sciences to name a few.
• Ease of implementation: implementation is done by configuring standard objects or creating new objects; additional level of customization via script is also possible.
• Lots of resources available on the product
• Supported by Oracle one of the world leader in IT
• Multiple developers can configure and test concurrently in their own workspace and then merge the result in the main application.

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

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• The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
• Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
• The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• Migrations between environments is one area that could be improved, with tools to compare and move data elements (source vs target).
• Easier ways to identify, through email or a web page, the health of the overall system (components, marketing campaigns, tasks, servers, etc).
• The UI seems to be improved with the newer versions of Siebel, but I believe it requires a lot of new features. It seems that other CRM solutions that are cloud-based are putting a lot of emphasis on the Usability and presentation, things where Siebel may need to catch up...

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

• User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
• Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
• Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.

Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.

Oracle Siebel CRM is an older Sales CRM, so many of it's features aren't as current as ones used today. However, it has a smoother and easy-to-use UI. We're glad that we can still access Oracle Siebel CRM because it's easier to find older information that we can't easily find in our Salesforce Lightning CRM tool.

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I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.

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There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.

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Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

We no longer have support for our Oracle Siebel CRM. When we did, the support was slow to get some things fixed, therefore, there was a lot of downtime. Of course, this slowed down our overall productivity and increased our overall frustration with the tool. However, it would be nice if we still had some support with it since we still do access it from time to time.

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

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A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface

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Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

The onsite was so helpful and worth the hours spent. All three people that came to represent Zuora had a lot to offer.

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Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

It was reliable.

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Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

We also connect to Oracle Business Intelligence, which is not even an option of the list of products above (that's always encouraging when products are missing from lists!) This connects to campaigns in Siebel along with users writing reports based on data from Siebel. I don't think OBIEE stacks up that great with other systems because it seems to be lacking in reports, and those who can make them have to be quite technical. Oracle Database I think stacks up because of how robust and speedy (at times) it can be

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

Zuora provides way more functionality than Recurly or SaaSOptics as a billing engine. However, it is not a general ledger system like NetSuite ERP, it is still designed to be primarily a billing function that feeds into a general ledger via automated general entries. It has simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

The product is capable of a lot, small companies and large companies can utilize it with ease

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Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info

• This has all my company needs for sales analytic. It has helped our call center and the sales portal become more lean and require less resources for their day-to-day.
• We use its research and direct email capabilities and use it to target specific groups of potential clients. We have seen an improvement of nearly 20%.
• We have clients who have used a few modules like bill summary, campaign management and customer information. Oracle Siebel CRM has helped them reap ROI within a year from going live.

• Poor support has slowed down our implementation of features and resolution of issues
• Lack of flexibility has led to some complex and unwieldy workaround solutions
• No useful built in AR reporting so we had to come up with our own solution
• Challenges with finance due to unreliability of Salesforce sync