Cherwell Review
Updated July 21, 2021

Cherwell Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cherwell Service Management

Cherwell is used extensively throughout the organization so that users can log service requests for Human Resources. For the Information Technology department, it is used for service delivery and asset management.
It is able to direct requests that are made to the correct team and manage massive inventories of stock with most of this being done without the need for any programming skills.
  • Service requests.
  • Incident management.
  • 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.
  • Project updates and controls are more visible.
  • Tickets logged by end users and correctly categorised and directed to the most appropriate team.
I have found that Cherwell is much easier to configure and customize. It is also cloud-based so you only need an internet connection to get going. There are no servers to maintain and there are no backup systems required to safeguard your data. We are now working in a much leaner team, easing the support overhead by having a clouded solution is a huge bonus.

Do you think Cherwell Service Management delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cherwell Service Management's feature set?

Yes

Did Cherwell Service Management live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cherwell Service Management go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cherwell Service Management again?

Yes

Managing stock is great. We control the whole asset life cycle with Cherwell. Complex automation is possible by combining PowerShell and one step, although a fair degree of expertise is required to do this. For instance, our HR system will now create user accounts in Active Directory and applies the correct privileges. It will so expire the accounts when a member of staff leaves the organization. The person's equipment will be delivered to the correct location with the appropriate tickets sent to correct teams to facilitate this.

Cherwell Service Management Feature Ratings

Organize and prioritize service tickets
9
Expert directory
9
Service restoration
Not Rated
Self-service tools
9
Subscription-based notifications
9
ITSM collaboration and documentation
9
ITSM reports and dashboards
10
Configuration mangement
9
Asset management dashboard
9
Policy and contract enforcement
7
Change requests repository
9
Change calendar
8
Service-level management
8

Using Cherwell Service Management

200 - Cherwell is used by the I.T. department for:
  1. Customer Support ticket management
  2. Problem Management
  3. Asset Management
  4. Automations and streamlining
  5. Categorisation of work and automatically assignment of work tickets to the correct team for progression.
  6. Control and authorisation of changes
Personnel Department:
  1. Support Requests and ticket management
  2. New start process management
6 - The skillsets that are required:

  • The ability to break down complicated tasks into a series of steps.
  • A big picture understanding of the system and processes you are defining.
  • A creative mindset to create a user experience that can present data and processes that are easy to understand and work through.
  • Ticket management
  • Consistent of the processing of routine work tasks.
  • Asset Management.
  • Identifying underlying issues.
  • We have been able to integrate related HR processes and I.T. and automate complicated work flows.
  • Realise cost savings through asset management, for example, licence management.
  • Identify areas of improvement, for example, service requests that are taking longer than expected.
  • By deploying to other business areas it may be possible to remove legacy systems that duplicate work flows or store data in silos.
  • Move tasks from between different services which have worked independently.
  • Allow external contractors to receive work tasks and update through integrations.
There has been little experience of downtime.
It is well received by end users.
The ability to customise it to integrate into existing systems is good.
The organisation is realising cost savings through the information it provides.
There is continued investment to develop the product by our own staff.
In most instances there is not a requirement for client software to run it as a simple web browser will do.

Evaluating Cherwell Service Management and Competitors

Yes - Cherwell was chosen to replace "Assyst". We review our software systems periodically to ensure good value for money and Cherwell best fitted our needs and budget.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
The ability to access this product from anywhere and to not have reliance on any in-house servers.
Having better integration with Azure AD using Graph API would be brilliant, maybe this is already a feature set. At the moment we interface with on-premise AD but I would like any future product to offer a better way to integrate with our directories.

Cherwell Service Management Implementation

We had access to the old system that Cherwell replaced. Some things were difficult to find in the beginning but it was a learning curve that got easier after a few days.
Yes - We switched over from Assyst in one step but it has been adopted by the rest of the organisation in a phased approach as we have retired legacy system.
Change management was minimal - We started small and have grown the system. In the future it would be a much greater issue to be consider as it has became so entwined in many aspects of our business processes.
  • Not having enough licences were an issue for us during implementation.
  • Some users did not like the web client.

Cherwell Service Management Support

It is great. We rarely experience any performance issues and when we do they are attentive and responsive. There are is an active support forum and quarterly user group meeting. These are great for innovation and idea-sharing on how to get the most out of the system. Bear in mind that you are using a cloud system and some of the issues that you may have might be with your own internal network.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes, we have premium support as we have a lot of staff who depend on its availability.
We got very good support when we wanted to publish the app in Office 365 and provide access with a single sign-on.

Using Cherwell Service Management

It is a product that can be heavily customised. We have many dashboards to suit different user roles that you can drill down to extract the information you require. Within our organisation there are a lot of expert end-users who produce these dashboards and short-cuts. An in-house development team to review requests and roll them out into the live environment should also be considered. The development role does not need to be a full-time just needs somebody with suitable expertise.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Requires technical support
  • Dashboards are fantastic. See who is overloaded or swamped with work.
  • Task scheduling is great too but it is an advanced feature.
  • Knowledge base articles, publishing, approval and reviewing is great function.
  • You may need to edit a save a particular part of a form before you can proceed to the next step. Forgetting to press the save button and finding a ticket has not been logged. You soon learn...