ServiceNow Customer Service Management vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

It is well suited for medium to large companies that manage different teams and need to communicate constantly and track progress in a timely manner. It is less suited for small enterprises as it will overwhelm users with the features and functionalities embedded.

For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.

Incentivized

• Allows for clear communication between help desk and end users.
• Provides a clean inventory option for both hardware items and software licenses.
• Navigation is very intuitive and user friendly.
• Many reporting features for all levels of the company.

Incentivized

• Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool.
• Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur.
• Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website.

Incentivized

• Adding in additional chat features would be nice
• Viewing where you stand in priority
• Having a way to automate more of the processes

Incentivized

• There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with.
• In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently.

Incentivized

Bottom line is that it does what you need it to do. We've been using Service Now as a ticket managing tool for a few years now. There's really not much it can't do when it comes to recording interactions. It has been nice using inventory tracking for software licenses and hardware as well.

Incentivized

It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.

Incentivized

Support has been very good. Any time there has been a real issue, the team has responded very quickly and identified the issue without a lot of repetitive questions that I've seen from other services. There is a great external community and internal knowledge base that covers pretty much anything you need.

Incentivized

They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.

Incentivized

Connectwise targets small to medium enterprises and kept things simple for cross-organizational communications. On the other hand, ServiceNow with users with more than 500 at least, tends to create lag and tension when all are using the app at the same time, especially getting reports in a timely manner.

From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or InVision, and it outdoes Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.

Incentivized

• The negative impact for my team is the delay in team completing tickets but not a system issue.
• A positive impact for my team is we can easily view the status of tickets and the follow-up emails are beneficial to maintain records of tickets.
• Negative impact is that there is no user job aid or helpful tools for new users.

Incentivized

• Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution)
• Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time

Incentivized