Cherwell Service Management Reviews

Cherwell's sales staff could use some improvement in the "paying attention to the little guy" area. It's true that sales people are focused on their larger potential commissions, and that is understandable, but as a small business, we were treated less than well by our Cherwell salesman. I would go so far as to say that he neglected us after we made the purchase and had a very serious complaint about what he sold us. We were sold a product without any implementation plan or package. I found out that we were probably the only customer that had this happen, but I wanted to mention t because it was huge headache to implement the product without any implementation help from the vendor.

I think Cherwell could do a better job of keeping their USA-based hosted server farm in better working order. Their infrastructure maintenance is improving and it doesn't affect Cherwell customers that host their own on-prem Cherwell servers, but for a long while they had a lot of failures at their on-demand server farm in Denver where they host instance for the US market. We would show up in the morning and our help desk technicians couldn't login for a couple of hours. They got these issues resolved quickly enough I suppose, within a few hours. And they did upgrade their Denver datacenter about a year ago and done better at maintaining it. But we literally can't do our jobs without Cherwell working as it s our primary help desk and end-user management tool.

The Web UI

Overall UIX

CMDB

Slow overall performance.

Not all search parameters available in dashboard creation option.

Web front end.

Unified client.

Support for web technologies.

Back-end workflows need to speed up. Some of them seem very slow.

Aesthetics - viewing on some of the dashboards cuts the words off, which makes it difficult to use those graphs for reporting purposes.

I don't really have a third option - I haven't used the software quite that long yet.

Cherwell currently has a sort of split system with an "Application" on one side and "Content" on the other. This is one of the greatest strengths because it enables deep customization to the "Content" while allowing new features and upgrades to the "Application" without causing disruption. Over the years, Cherwell has added great improvements to the Out-of-the-Box "Content" and the "Application" and while you can easily upgrade the "Application" side to gain the new features it provides, upgrading the "Content" is a much bigger challenge. Cherwell is very aware of this challenge, and is working to solve it, but the more you customize your "Content" the more difficult it is to pull in new features.

Ease of upgrades and content.

Report writing.

Dashboard creation.

Mobile app.

Responsive design/ADA.

Calling customer support.

Software is buggy.

It's quirky.

It isn't the best looking application overall.

It can be finicky when it comes to customization. You have to spend some time to get the results you are looking for.

Some of the navigation can be a bit confusing, using search function can sometimes be more difficult due to the level of granularity they want.

Process scheduling is fiddly.

Word wrapping during text entry sometimes does not happen properly. You need to pop out the text box to see it properly.

Multiple sequences.

Connectivity issues on the back end system (for on-prem installations).

Dashboard function

Screen displays

Ease of implementation.

Some system performance and stability issues need to be addressed.

Cherwell is slow. Very very slow. This is somewhat understandable because it is a very complex tool and a lot of things are happening in the tool, but it still needs to be a lot faster. It takes over 7 seconds to load an incident. The web client is faster, but it doesn't have all the features of the rich client (installs locally).

Absolutely terrible UI: there's a left search pane, a right search pane, and a whole bunch of tabs at the bottom. What you get in the end is a screen that is divided into many small sections, and each section has large contents inside them so that you have to scroll left/right and up/down for many of them. It's the worst UI I have ever seen. Now add this to the slow speed mentioned earlier, and all your users hate it.

While I understand that a lot of customization can be up to an organization, the platform was always a huge pain when going beyond the installed client. The web client and mobile app were very problematic and clunky, locked up frequently.

My university was 50% Windows/50% Apple, and there's no Apple client.

The built in remote control capabilities on tickets for client machines didn't play well with our active directory. We always just used a different program.

Error handling could have been much better. Accidentally assigning ticket items to "non-existent" resources could crash the client. Such as if the resource was removed before a worker's view was refreshed.

Tickets can go into limbo very easily, and seemed to require more development than it should to protect us from doing that. This is because there's a lot of different ways to do the same thing. Too many touch points all over the place in the UI.

Too many ticket priority options. Clients could be assigned personal higher priorities through VIP status, tickets could be given their own priorities that conflict with client status, and SLA deadlines could assign other conflicting priorities. There were more but these were the most problematic if you're using Cherwell in a situation where you have limited developer time to nail down all the inconsistencies every day.

There was an arbitrary time tracking feature on tickets that attempted to gather data on how long certain resources took, but because the UI was very cumbersome this was more of a pain to do and was very inaccurate of the actual work it takes to do certain things.

Sometimes comments made on a ticket do not generate emails to the technician who owns it, and they will not know there is an update from the customer without checking it

Sometimes I will see an error pop up when copying text but it can easily be closed

Sometimes the time-out window for staying logged in does not appear on top of other applications so I will not know it's logging me out

I would like to see more project management aspects incorporated. The ability to track progress on a timeline/graph. We've customized a template for office moves but are limited in the number of steps it will track before I need to add another incident.

I want the contact information to be more robust so that multiple people can be added to an incident and e-mailed at once instead of having to type in names in emails over and over again.

Resolution description is buried in the e-mail template that we send.

Sometimes it can be slow

The search function can be confusing

Editing of email templates is not easily apparent

Cherwell would often crash, both on logging in or in the middle of entering a ticket. This was extremely difficult and time-consuming on my end.

While it was possible to customize a workspace, the method for doing so was not intuitive.

There was not a large help or training source to draw from in order to better oneself at Cherwell.

Within our deployment model of Cherwell, there are core functional pieces that have to be configured at the top level, rather than the sub levels, which make some areas difficult to manage. For example, if one agency wants to use feature x in one way, but another agency wants to configure the same feature in a different way, then consensus has to be gained first. Its not as fully flexible in the base configuration space as would be ideal.

Automated email processes, especially in the volumes that the State of Wisconsin goes through require some tweaking to allow them to fire in an effective way. We sometimes see problems with backlogs of these.

Licensing based on concurrency and usage is a very modern approach, however, it leads to challenges in how customers use it. For example, we have automated log-off's in place for the local clients in order to manage our own usage, to maintain reasonable costs.

The application is very good.

This weekend the current version was upgraded.

Senior management can supply full information of the time tracking with the associated ticket numbers.

Creating and running reports is ridiculously, impossibly complex and complicated

The product is so open-ended it's almost too broad. We have ended up creating a lot of in-house customizations to the product that would have been nice to have out of the box.

Dashboards are great to have but they are awful in implementation. They are not dynamic and act more like a Bitmap file made in Windows 95 Microsoft Paint than a dynamic webpage. It would be nice if Dashboards were dynamic and were more like HTML or a web-based platform. It doesn't make sense why web design products like WIX exist yet the dashboards are needlessly complicated and have static image borders, sizes, etc.

During my time working on the Cherwell implementation and subsequent modifications, I've noticed some 'out of the box bugs' that I'd like to see corrected in future versions of Cherwell. Some are simple oversights. Examples include leaving the Last Name out of the default Grid for the Customer table and some issues with the SLA date fields being set correctly in some cases.

Cherwell really needs a distributed data center model so global customers can run a single SaaS instance and whose remote teams can connect to their nearest Cherwell server. Our teams in France and the USA currently connect to one Cherwell server in the UK and the performance/latency for our folks furthest away from the server could be better.

The documentation could certainly be expanded upon. It does a good job explaining what everything is but doesn't go into enough detail to help you understand how to use it. Examples could be included at the bottom to help readers understand the content and how to apply it.

The interface is somewhat clunky to navigate and at times finding where things are located takes some time.

If you are idle too long in the application it will constantly pop up a message that you have been logged out due to inactivity but you cannot then close the application without having to end the task from the task manager in Windows.