Minimalist and customizable, but ultimately dated, slow, and a productivity hog
October 12, 2015
Minimalist and customizable, but ultimately dated, slow, and a productivity hog
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
8
Modules Used
- Siebel CRM Technology
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Siebel CRM
We used to use Oracle Siebel CRM in my department until we moved over to Salesforce about 10 months ago. I used Siebel CRM myself in two different capacities: (1) as a technical support engineer it was for managing tickets and support cases, and (2) as an Application (Pre-sales) Engineer, it was used to manage sales opportunities and activities related to customer management.
The problem it addressed in each instance was having a single place to manage correspondence, activity history, deliverables, quotes/purchasing information, and resource involvement from our side.
The problem it addressed in each instance was having a single place to manage correspondence, activity history, deliverables, quotes/purchasing information, and resource involvement from our side.
- Customizability of views. If I had the right query string, I could basically create a "view" or "query" to gather exactly the type of information I needed with specific criteria. In our organization, we would trade query strings back and forth with each other to create the types of views we needed. I like the compact representation.
- Minimal interface. There's not too much bloat, with no added social media features and all that other crap that's becoming an unnecessary part of every other product out there.
- Easy to pick up. My company's internal training did a good job of teaching us how to use Siebel CRM. It didn't take days of training, either. Pretty intuitive.
- Dated interface. It looks like something out of the early 2000s. No concept of things like tabs and floating non-modal dialogs.
- Slow performance. No matter whether I was onsite or remotely using through VPN, Siebel CRM was SLOW. Our current system with Salesforce is much faster.
- Incompatibility with other browsers. For some reason, the application required IE 8.0 only, and would not work on any other browser, including newer versions of IE.
- Searchability. I mentioned in the positives that it was easy to customize queries. That's only if you know what to write in a query. If you don't know what to look for, there is no all-encompassing search, and it's very unintuitive to create the right query for what you're looking for. I mostly asked power users to send me their pre-built queries, which allowed me to be more productive.
- Decrease in productivity. Siebel CRM was often a barrier to faster turnaround of support cases and activity monitoring because of slow performance.
- Necessitated lots of help. We had enough training to pick up the basics pretty easily. But creating the customized reports necessary to gain insight constantly required input from power users and others more experienced. IMHO, this should be a much more intuitive process.
- Managed correspondence well. At least we could easily trace past history of correspondence with each customer and internal resources.
Siebel is quite a bit slower in performance and lacks support for modern browsers, in contrast to Salesforce.com. It's also much less searchable and discoverable (with regard to insights) and lacks a fresh look. I'm not privy to all the reasons why our organization moved away from Siebel CRM, but I'm glad we did.