Such a Difference: Blackbaud's Help Desk
April 24, 2017

Such a Difference: Blackbaud's Help Desk

Petra Hall | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud CRM

We are pretty much a Blackbaud shop, using Blackbaud products for finance, development, and student management. The push to go with Blackbaud has been mainly to build as seamless an interaction as possible between the needs of those three departments. We are soon going to implement the next version of the finance and fund development software, and are currently implementing the worlds-of-difference replacement Blackbaud is developing for their student management solutions.
  • Help desk. Can't praise that enough. As the main in-house resource for figuring out all things Blackbaud, when something "interesting" occurs their online chat is both responsive, helpful, and delightfully prompt.
  • Reaching out to customers to get their input. Particularly in the past 5 years, Blackbaud has vastly improved their interest in listening to their customers.
  • The interface is overly complex - intimidating for the new user. That said, they are working on improving that with the next generation. It will be interesting to see what abilities will go by the wayside in an effort to simplify.
  • Setting up user access is complex, and not complex enough in some cases.
  • This is difficult to measure. It isn't so much that Blackbaud has saved us time and effort, as it has given us a different way to do things.
Blackbaud is very good for the finance and development office, but lacks some basic flexibility needed for a school: such as payment plans and the ability for parents to choose a payment plan, provide a credit card, and have the installments charged automatically. From what I understand, Blackbaud knows that is an issue and has partnered with another company to overcome it. However, it is not available in Canada: which brings up another issue. Blackbaud is US-based software. There are going to be compatibility issues, such as things that deal with banking.