Salesforce Service Cloud vs. Verint Knowledge Management

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

Verint KMS is great for organizing content by categories for different teams and by different topics. It is easy to search and the Related Content makes moving from one piece of content to the next relevant piece quite easy. On the authoring side, the ability to schedule publishing or expiration is very handy. It is also really easy to make edits and have content ready and published for readers quickly. Verint's KMS isn't well suited if your users wish to be able to organize their favourited content or if you need a wide-range of options on the authoring end of things.

Incentivized

• 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

• The tools to submit and manage user feedback are very effective - they help us respond quickly and interconnect the feedback to the applicable content.
• The end user experience is clean and feels familiar, making it optimal to support a group of people who generally have never experienced a KM application before.
• Our audience responds well to our ability to insert images, GIFs, videos, PDFs, and more into our content.

• 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

• The authoring side could be improved with additional options for fonts and easier formatting for table content. I have issues with trying to add colour to one portion of a table and not the other, so I have to resort to creating in Word first and then copying over to Verint. There is also no option to create steps in one row and the next step in the next row. I end up just adding 1., 2., etc. manually.
• Many users would like to be able to organize their bookmarks into folders and the system doesn't allow this. Many have taken to creating bookmark folders in Microsoft Edge instead.
• There were a few bugs that went on for a few months that made the initial launch of the KMS more difficult for the users and on the authoring side. The issues were with how the search results came up and what displayed for related content. It wasn't the best first impression for our agents using the system while on calls and made it more difficult. The issues were fixed after a few months of use.

Incentivized

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.

Knowledge is an exceptional tool that has solved a gap to reduce the training time of new associates and promote knowledge retention

Incentivized

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

Verint KM has many features that - when used the 'right way' can expedite search, content usage, and maintenance. Unfortunately, not all end users want to be bothered with 'the right way' and are looking for simplistic and predictive options (which any KM solution would be hard-pressed to deliver).

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.

The support and development teams for Knowledge are exceptional. They are attentive and truly care about the experience of their customers and their goals

Incentivized

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

This was the simplest integration of software I've ever experienced.

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

All of these tools were very useful and practical. For our decision, it came down to understanding our core audience - we determined our average associate was largely unfamiliar with call center and office work in their prior work experience, and as such they would not have previously worked in a KM application before. To help adoption, we sought the solution with the simplest and most familiar interface, and based on internal focus group feedback, that was Verint KM Pro.

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• 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

• Content is easier to keep up to date and publish on an urgent basis.
• Some users love the system, while others still find it difficult to find the information they need and miss the former guides we used. I think this is a result of the system issues that persisted for a few months after launch and will hopefully improve with time.
• Users love being able to submit feedback and it makes it easier for errors, missing information and out of date information to be caught and fixed.

Incentivized