Item: ServiceMax
Rating: 1
Author: David Corbari

Overall Satisfaction with ServiceMax

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ServiceMax was intended to manage our ticketing, service delivery, and invoicing. The goals of the program were to ensure adherence to our customer contract pricing, improve field response time, and streamline billing processes. The platform is used in conjunction with other internal systems and was intended to become the core component to manage all service delivery.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Grinding workflows to a halt
Drastically expanding the time it takes to perform essential job functions
Breaking with every Salesforce update

Cons

ServiceMax developers could benefit from having, at a minimum, a surface level understanding of the limitations of object oriented programming
The platform should be a standalone product instead of attempting to run on top of an existing platform with identical record types
ServiceMax should provide free state of the art servers and workstations, like the ones used to fold proteins or render complex AI generated graphics for their customers to run the platform on. This would give them the chance to experience the lightning quick responses of legendary programs such as Netscape or America On-line

Most Important Features

Ticketing
Invoicing
Contract Management

Return on Investment

Significantly delayed DSO
Drastically increased invoicing errors
Scared away a number of new recruits who saw that the learning curve was too steep

Key Insights

Do you think ServiceMax delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with ServiceMax's feature set?

Did ServiceMax live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of ServiceMax go as expected?

Would you buy ServiceMax again?

Likelihood to Recommend

ServiceMax boasts that it runs natively on the SalesForce platform however, in reality, it functions less as a native component and more so as a confusing doppelganger that redirects your work at every turn from its intended output to something else entirely. Although it blends right into SalesForce on a surface level it is by no means seamless as it takes every frustrating or slow element of its host platform and amplifies them, seeming exponentially at times. This is of course until you'd like the ServiceMax components to differentiate themselves in some manner from elements that are actually native to SalesForce. For example, let's say you'd like to run a report of tickets pending review for invoicing but both SalesForce and ServiceMax's service platforms have the record types "Ticket" and "Invoice", what do you do? Well, you get to take part in what will soon become your new top housekeeping task, hours of trial and error until you stumble upon the magic combination of selections that might get you *most* of your data. In short, ServiceMax is...

Painfully slow - I wrote this review while waiting for it to update a single line in Price Book)
Inherently buggy
Unintuitive
Hopefully shortlived

Comments

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Choose anything else as a service platform, literally anything.

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