Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017.
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SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
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SAP Service Cloud helps deliver customer value and protect the brand with intelligent customer service. It enables the user to engage with customers at their convenience, connect service with the value chain and deliver greater profitability.
The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
SAP Service Cloud is well suited with its omni-channel capabilities giving the possibility to collect service requests from different channels like phone, e-mail or CTI telephony. It also has nice User Interface (when it comes to desktop version). On the other hand SAP Service Cloud needs to be definitiely improved in terms of mobile app, which is horrible and it has limited development possibilities.
Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
While SAP Service Cloud offers a wealth of features, its interface can sometimes feel overwhelming. For newcomers, especially those not tech-savvy, a more intuitive or simplified layout would be beneficial.
While it allows for some level of personalization, making deep customizations can be challenging. Given the unique requirements of our client's customer service, having more flexibility in tailoring the tool to our exact needs would be nice.
While SAP Service Cloud integrates well within the SAP ecosystem, it can sometimes be less smooth when linking up with non-SAP third-party tools. Enhancing these integrations would streamline our operations, especially when using other software tools alongside it.
SAP Service Cloud offers sturdy competencies for case control, workflow automation, and purchaser engagement. However, since our organization continues to be within the early assessment section, we have not but experienced its complete potential. Once fully applied and custom designed to our desires, the score can also increase as we investigate usability and integration with other SAP solutions.
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.
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.
I have found that sometimes issues reported to the SAP takes more time also they lack system support with respect to the priority . Also we don't see RCA for the issues raised. Also turn around time for the issues is not fixed as the support is global sometimes the issues float here and there.
Zoho Desk is the ultimate software for clear communication, but when we compared these two according to our needs, we found out that SAP Service Cloud is the best option for us. Since it provides everything in one location, Zoho Desk is somewhat lacking in this area. That was the reason for choosing SAP Service Cloud.
