Driving cost-effective and meaningful impact in small-medium enterprise
February 25, 2021

Driving cost-effective and meaningful impact in small-medium enterprise

Pearl Cheah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Coda

Coda is still in a developmental stage in our organization. We are still learning and discovering where it can drive impact. Right now, we currently use it for:
Installation base management/reporting, Project management, Customer marketing emails, Point-of-care usage, Post-event analysis, Trackers, simple address book serving as a foundations to a simple CRM, Shielding calculation

Pros

  • Automation is fantastic. Automating row creations and actions has helped streamline a lot of our processes without sacrificing too much time and effort, making overall transition easier for most of the users.
  • Flexibility. We can virtually build almost anything and migrate things from our Excel.
  • Simplifies information access for the team, keeping information current and accessible.
  • App-like feel in mobile. This is one of the winning points when we took up Coda.
  • In the past 1 year of using Coda, I have observed large leaps of development and new feature release. This gives confidence to me as a new user that this product is here to stay and tries its best to stay relevant.

Cons

  • It takes getting used to in terms of how the formulas per column is implemented, in contrast to how we build tables in Excel. For organization/team purchase, it would be worth considering having a training for the core team of users. Right now, we do a lot of self-learning.
  • Inability to email charts or image without these objects being hosted on a third party. The community has been great in providing workarounds but it would be much more convenient to be able to have such ability natively.
  • APAC Support. I'm based in Malaysia, due to timezone differences, even with a livechat implemented, the support for each step and conversation takes up to 24 hours per response. Having some hours covered in our timezone would greatly improve customer support experience.
  • In general, in terms of positive impact, we are able to run more meaningful actions without additional investment in time from the team (except for the person managing /creating the documents).
  • We operate in a world full of information that can be overwhelming. Data is collected all the time, but we don't have meaningful or easy ways to analyze the information. With Coda, we can customize our formulas flexibly to our needs, and thus we are able to have more understanding of the vast information to drive the correct future actions.
We were looking for many different things to improve our internal processes before we came across Coda. A large part of my work involves marketing, project management, service management and data analytics.
For a company like ours, we find Coda the most cost-effective and flexible solution to what we needed. While there are other products made for specific needs, we find Coda [is] a good place to start - for us to evaluate what we really needed - before pursuing a dedicated solution which may cost us more if not evaluated properly, and may very well end up a white elephant in our organization.

Do you think Coda delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Coda's feature set?

Yes

Did Coda live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Coda go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Coda again?

Yes

I think Coda is well suited for management of simple data in general. I'm a medical physicist, so some of our calculations are quite complex. This makes it such that I have to break down the formula into various columns and run a multiple calculations before it can output to a final result that I want. Hence, complex calculations, while workable, expect to spend more time in the building process. And if it's too large a data for calculations, you might run into a less than optimal situation with document loading.

We are still discovering more areas to work on and where it can add value/impact to our internal processes. I believe there's still room for growth in our usage for our organization.

Using Coda

25 - While mainly 2 of us are the primary caretakers of Coda where we build docs and implement, the rest are mainly general users. We comprise of a variety of functions ranging from sales, customer support, engineering, and project management.
2 - Anyone familiar with Excel would be excellent.
  • Downtime reporting.
  • Consumable usage.
  • Customer Tracker/Address book.
  • Project Management.
  • Downtime reporting. We use this for live updates when a system goes down - our engineers can easily mark the system as down and log the time up when system is operational again. This provided us with useful stats over time.
  • Shielding Calculations. Still a work in progress, but I see a lot of potential for this. If able to output reports in customizable format/pdf, this would make our work a lot more efficient.
  • Daily consumption of consumable or logging of error rates. Our point-of-care team have been using this to track customer usage. What used to be at least an hour of data entry and processing has now been cut down to minutes.
  • There are many ways to move this forward and I think we are still investigating the areas we can implement. One is to have a status update check on our regulatory affairs with time-based email reports.
Coda is definitely something that has been proven to drive positive impact in our organization. We have many divisions that can benefit from this that we have yet to explore. It would definitely be worth renewing.

Evaluating Coda and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
We tested the free version and subsequently the pro version to understand the differences. But the journey was definitely independent. The single most important factor for us was the app-like interface in mobile version. This was important to our service division. That level of user-friendliness enabled us to have more confidence to operate with Coda as the heart for some of our key activities.
Yes. I would reach out to the manufacturer directly to get an overview so that I can save time in evaluation and decision making.

Coda Implementation

I'm relatively inexperienced but this experience is meaningful. It would have been nice to have some guidance from Coda so that we understood more on Coda's purpose and potential.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - We tested first on the items that we definitely knew what we wanted in terms of definitions. This was our downtime logging and uptime calculation document.
This helped us become very confident in what Coda was possible for. From there, we learned key points like understanding overall processes before building the doc since that will drive the overall objective of the doc's purpose.
Coda's implementation is still relatively an ongoing thing since our adoption is quite niche to a few subdivisions in our organization.
Change management was minimal - In terms of manpower, we didn't really have to do a lot of change of management, but it modified the way we interacted with one another. We were more collaborative at a higher level, since the Coda management in our organization is run by the people of the physics division. So we learned to work with various departments to look into ways that Coda might be able to resolve some unique bottlenecks.
  • Buy-in or support from colleagues. Not everyone likes change. Even if we rolled out the docs first, encouraging usage was tough.

Coda Training

  • no training
I won't recommend it unless you really want to go through that journey on your own and you have the time to. If you don't have the time, it would be better to learn it from somebody who has the experience.

Configuring Coda

I think it's just right. Since it's user-based rather than feature, it makes it more scalable and flexible.
Identify your core users who would be building docs and maintaining them. Identify their skill level, too. It wouldn't [hurt] to start with the free version to test the look and feel of the overall product before jumping into a purchase that you might regret later.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
No. We use it as it is out of the box.

Coda Support

Mainly due to timezone differences. I think Coda's support in general is well implemented and executed. They know their stuff and are helpful. But since I'm not in the same timezone, solution rates are slower for me, and that's not something I prefer. I work in customer service, too, and more often than not, time is important. Shortening the solution time would be a much greater experience.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Difficult to get immediate help
Slow Initial Response
We purchased the Team pricing and we qualify for basic training as well as priority support. That being said, Coda was not visible to us on this somehow and we didn't really think of reaching out for request of training. It would be helpful that Coda contacted directly when we upgraded our plan.
Yes - Quite quickly I would say. One fine day I discovered the problem was fixed but we weren't notified of the fix so I don't know how soon the fix was implemented after the initial report.
When I was new to Coda, I couldn't understand the formulas well. Coda has a nice feature where we can share our docs directly with Support. Support helped to modify my formulas so that it was working how I wanted it to. Saved me a lot of time. But also gave me a nice lesson indirectly on how to work my formulas properly.

Using Coda

Coda can seem either really useful or really useless. The extremes of both ends is driven by what our own understanding of what we want to implement. If we lack this understanding, it will be easy to misunderstand Coda's usability especially in the wrong context.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Slow to learn
  • Creating chart views out of existing tables. Much easier than Excel.
  • Buttons are elegant ways to add information into a table. Especially if we want to control/avoid messes made by colleagues who are sharing the documents.
  • Some formulas are easier to run in Excel due to the nature of how we build formulas. In Coda, it feels limited and a frequent need to keep breaking down formulas into sections.
  • Gantt Charts are not what we are used to so it feels limited in terms of features.
Yes - Fairly well. Works best in simplified views. Took a bit of effort to understand how the interface works for tables. Sometimes it feels like an app. More often than not it's a long scrollable (left-right) table.

Coda Reliability

I think scalability is definitely good here since it's based on number of doc makers. Implementation into each dept becomes simpler. That being said, due to the nature of our work, we find it easier that we have a "super user" and then a team of other doc makers. This would make the doc creation and management more efficient.
So far in the past year, we haven't had situations that Coda has gone down for us which is great.
We haven't done any integrations - the initial part of our experience we found that for docs with complex formulas, the page tends to load slowly but in recent months, Coda has improved and optimized the loading times in general and we generally don't find any problems in terms of speed anymore.

Integrating Coda

I don't have much experience in general in this regard.
  • Zoom
  • Google Forms through Zapier
  • Gmail
Zoom: Specific for Meetings, I don't find it extremely useful at the moment since it can't pull out attendance information (except in Webinar mode)
Google forms: We used this via Zapier but since Coda launched forms, we no longer have to use Google forms. We only use Google forms for more complex forms. Coda forms is still mainly a basic survey form.
Gmail: This is probably the best thing that Coda can do. Having email connected has been extremely useful and we use this feature a lot for email updates and marketing.
  • Outlook/Exchange
  • Synology Cloud
  • SAP Hana
It would be good to integrate some of our existing solutions to simplify the flow of data. To my knowledge, there's no support or plan to support this integration.
  • File import/export
Get someone who understand[s] integration to work with you.

Relationship with Coda

We didn't have a relationship or discussion during the sales process. We independently evaluated and decided on our own.
Good response post-sale in customer support, but limited by timezone differences.
Not applicable
Not applicable

Upgrading Coda

Yes - We went from Pro to Team. No downtime. We just needed to migrate our docs.
  • Better management of users and access.
  • Unlimited docs and lines.
  • Improved Cross-Doc limits.
  • Haven't thought about it.
Yes - We needed to improve user access and some extra features. Mainly because we wanted to use our work email for login instead of Gmail (personal emails) as well. Change went well, but it was a hassle to remind colleagues to use their work email instead of Google account, since Coda's signup page defaults to registering with Google. People tend to miss the sign below to register with non-google accounts.

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