Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite (discontinued) vs. ServiceMax

If you need a hosted rather than cloud based CRM, Siebel is a consideration. It's best suited to organizations with a large customer database. Given the complexity involved you need at least two full time marketing analysts.The email marketing functionality isn't core to the offering and most organizations would be much better served by cloud based email systems. Siebel offers a very comprehensive feature set and is powerful in the hands of a super user. However, given the costs involved in upgrading a hosted solution I would put serious effort into convincing your decision makers to go for a cloud based CRM instead.

Incentivized

Small deployments, where you have some specific need for ServiceMax and absolutely need offline capabilities, and are willing to deal with the problems. Otherwise, you may be better off looking at the built-in Work Orders and field service module that Salesforce is now providing. Their app is direct competition for ServiceMax and integrates much better with cases and knowledge articles.

Incentivized

• Siebel EMS offered useful customer insight and more effective dialogue with recipients by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time.
• Siebel EMS was very effective for loyalty lifecycle and retention by seamlessly integrating with marketing and CRM platforms.
• Siebel EMS was instrumental in aligning marketing, sales and analytics divisions.

Incentivized

• As it's built on Salesforce, the reporting tools are fairly robust
• The service flow managers can be setup to easily lead technicians to entering data in the right place

Incentivized

• Oracle Siebel Marketing Suite's processing time is not as fast as I would expect it to be. This is the major improvement I would like to see in it.
• It requires a very high level of training being given to the employees for configuring and implementing it in the business needs.
• Expert employees are needed in order to understand the functionality of Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite, which is not easy to find.

Incentivized

• Dispatch console seems slow and the data is more of a pull than a push into the database.
• It seems to be a Ferrari and takes a lot of labor hours to configure.
• Still does not integrate with Apple's products very well.

Incentivized

A very conservative data security policy limits the organization to a hosted solution. At particular issue is the tendency of cloud based CRMs to have data centres based in the US, a major issue for Canadian consumers. Once you have integrated a system of this size and complexity, and have the staff resources to utilize it effectively, it's hard to justify a move to an alternative. Consider Siebel if you are a conservatively run organization with a large database of customers and a big marketing team

Incentivized

Engaged account management. Support is based worldwide but handoffs have not been too painful.

Incentivized

Salesforce is easier to use and more open source and available for external integrations.

Incentivized

ServiceMax has an offline capability, and also integrates with our Salesforce side of business. At the time, Salesforce did not have a field service application so we could not consider it, but if we could now, we would probably go with that instead. ServiceMax is also expensive. But at the time, ServiceMax was the only offering out there that integrated with Salesforce, had mobile offline capability, and could operate at the scale we needed.

Incentivized

• It has increased the business tactics as we have added more clients who wish to use this technology.

Incentivized

• ROI for ServiceMax is mostly dependent on how in depth the organization wants the software. Our ROI is expected within the second year of operation due to the complexity of integration and the initial training requirements for in-house programmers.
• Inventory control ROI is expected within year three or four due to the number of technicians and creating the foundation of information to import into ServiceMax. Expectations are the front end programming will be complete and our programmers will be better acquainted with the modules and architecture to make the inventory integration smoother than the initial integration.
• Our organization has been working with ServiceMax for ten months and beginning to incorporate the financials to the work orders. This process has not been as seamless as once projected and the root causes are under investigation. It appears the original fields available to track time between employees were not in depth nor segregated sufficiently for granularity.

Incentivized