Item: Parature (Discontinued)
Rating: 3
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Parature

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We previously used Parature for all our customer-facing support needs. Tickets came in via email or our support portal and were created in Parature. Then, a support engineer would triage and assign those tickets depending on the complexity. Ticket-based support allowed us to support more customers in a far more efficient manner than via phone.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It's functional. It does what it needs to do without too many excess frills or features.
Uptime was generally good and we were usually notified of any planned outages.

Cons

Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.

Return on Investment

Parature wasn't a very efficient use of time. It actually caused some slow performance due to the learning curve and inability to have more than one incident open at any given point in time.

Alternatives Considered

BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite,Salesforce Service Cloud

At the time, I believe we chose Parature because of pricing. That decision was made before my tenure with the company.

Likelihood to Renew

We left Parature for Salesforce Service Cloud. While Parature was functional, as our business matured we needed better support, more stability, and a lot more features. In addition, it integrated with our sales, marketing, and finance department, allowing us to all use a single solution and be able to share information across departments.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you don't need robust do-it-yourself reporting and if you are running a customer service organization that only works one incident at a time, Parature might be a suitable solution for you. If you're a busy office handling multiple issues at a time and if you want real time information about team performance at your fingertips, there are likely better solutions that integrate with sales, marketing, and finance.

Using Parature

Usability

It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Technical support not required Consistent Feel confident using	Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn

Easy Tasks

Difficult Tasks

Assigning tickets required multiple mouse clicks, as did closing tickets
Use of frames and sessions did not allow us to have multiple support tickets open at any time
It was very hard to get useful reporting data from this application

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes - It was acceptable for looking at tickets, but I would never have wanted to use it to actually provide support to my customers on any frequent level.

Comments

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