Ease of customization and flexibility make Agiloft our first choice for automating business processes
Updated December 04, 2014
Ease of customization and flexibility make Agiloft our first choice for automating business processes
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
release_2013_02-19564-334-r144182 2014/01/09 03:09
Modules Used
- All
Overall Satisfaction with Agiloft
We chose Agiloft to replace NetSuite for CRM (Customer Support Automation), SFA (Sales Automation), and general business process automation. However as we have used it, we're starting to consider it for other tasks as well. Currently our operations/support and sales/marketing organizations are using it. We switched from NetSuite CRM to Agiloft, because Agiloft could address fully custom support flows and timings which were necessary for our business. Netsuite made it impossible to respond to service requests as quickly as our SLAs promised our customers, and forced us into a standard support process that did not match our value proposition for fully managed high performance cloud services.We are switching from NetSuite SFA to Agiloft SFA because our sales people and managers, like in most companies "have their own way" of doing things and want the tool to support them in it rather than forcing them to comply with a standard method or requiring expensive and extensive professional services. We are investigating switching our billing from NetSuite to Agiloft because we have confidence in Agiloft's management team and their intention to listen to what we need and provide it as fast as possible. Our operations department is investigating using Agiloft for IT systems management, both for ITIL and as a human-accessible hub for cloud provisioning and billing information.
- Easy coding-free customization and process-oriented customization interface allows us to delegate ownership of business processes to the layer of management closest to the users of the services Agiloft provides, allowing us to rapidly adapt to new business needs and avoid expensive and slow professional-service based development cycles or a dedicated in-house admin team.
- Extremely flexible, so we are starting to use it for all kinds of things that we never originally intended it for, including managing change control for our customers, contract management, etc. People in our organization tell each other how effective the tool is which encourages using it to solve problems.
- The product is clearly designed with forethought and ingenuity, which pays off repeatedly when trying to address a new application. The cleverness of coding-free customization endears it to its administrators.
- High quality support and professional services from a well-trained onshore team are available so we never felt as though Agiloft stood in the way of implementation.
- Though we have only minimal usage so far, Agiloft offers a lot of different ways to interface to other systems, which will keep it relevant as we build out our automation and encourages us to use it as a central repository that can be easily accessed, processed, and modified as necessary, enabling its automation features to make good decisions that support automated service delivery to our clients.
- The look and feel is behind the latest offerings from competitors which can make getting users to switch to Agiloft difficult. In particular, there are limitations on formatting, placement, and type of custom elements on pages, or even custom pages themselves that contain unstructured content (essentially a custom dashboard.) These limitations have in practice not yet kept us from getting what we wanted done with the product.
- The flexibility of the product begs for more nearly-complete custom applications (customizations) that can be instantly deployed and then tweaked to meet our needs. Creating one is easy enough, but this would speed the process even more.
- I wish there was more financial functionality. Everything we do ties to the money, and being able to manage the money from the same app (AR/billing is the most important to us) would help a great deal.
- We are able to offer industry leading support and service SLAs to our clients because Agiloft can automate our support process, unlike other tools we have looked at.
- We are able to automate our own sales process rather than follow a prewritten one, which promotes adoption of sales force automation. (Most sales departments are full of individual tools each person uses to get around the limitation of the company's provided tool!)
- We are able to automate many processes we never thought we would be able to without custom coding. We're only starting to scratch the surface of what we think we can use Agiloft for.
Agiloft's singular advantage is its ease of customization that allows you to capture automation requirements right at the point of use. We knew our company would always be developing new requirements for its customer-facing processes and any tool that made customization difficult was an inferior choice for us. Other vendors offered similar levels of customization, but when we dug deeper, Agiloft was the only one that delivered it.
Our management team came from the IT and development side of NetSuite and we have used it to manage our business almost since inception. However, its support, marketing, and sales functionality was too difficult to modify and built to meet too broad a set of requirements, so we could never get full adoption or utilization, and it stood in the way of delivering the service levels we needed to provide our customers. We still use NetSuite for back-of-the-house financial functions which don't need that level of customization, but for everything else, the way forward has led us to choose Agiloft.