Item: Totango
Rating: 1
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We attempted to use Totango for client success/customer success. We had hoped, we could use Totango for setting up customer satisfaction scores; creating alerts on user interactions; volume; etc.

Pros and Cons

I don't think Totango does anything well.

Integrations -- in my experience, they constantly break and disconnect.
Implementation -- I feel it was a HUGE challenge to set-up our environment. It took over 200 hours and it didn't work.
Communication -- during implementation/onboarding, in my opinion, we were mislead on how to create some of our custom data objects and it ended up being a big waste of time since the approach we were instructed to use ended up being incorrect.

Return on Investment

Time -- I feel it was a huge waste of time to try to stand-up our environment. Yeesh. It still frustrates me over a year later.
Money -- In our case, there was no recourse on our subscription. We tried to get out of it after never being able to use the product for its intended purpose. We expressed disappointment and frustration with our use of it but, I feel it fell on deaf ears.
The only real positive was that we were able to avoid the pitfalls of Totango's UI and features when we stood up our own internal customer success system.
Sales process -- we felt misled during the sales process. The capabilities and "ease of use" were overstated.

Alternatives Considered

Asana, Airtable, Zendesk Talk, Zendesk Support Suite, Front, RingCentral MVP, Microsoft 365, Vanta, Microsoft Intune, WordPress, Caspio, Zapier and Salesforce CMS

I've implemented dozens of systems over the last 15 years and, I feel, Totango was by far the most challenging. I have a background in several areas, but the most applicable to Totango is my background in data management, systems administration, programming, web design, web dev. Totango was very challenging to set-up. Other systems have more intuitive UIs and onboarding. For anyone wanting to use Totango, don't. For those that are still not convinced, I would make sure you are game for a very long implementation and the ongoing maintenance of syncing/resyncing. If you are in charge of implementation, in my experience, this is a not a 'set it and forget it' type of platform. It does require someone who is highly technical to partner with your customer success team to make sure it is functioning properly.

Key Insights

Do you think Totango delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Totango's feature set?

Did Totango live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Totango go as expected?

Would you buy Totango again?

Other Software Used

RingCentral MVP, Front, Zendesk Support Suite

Likelihood to Recommend

I don't think Totango is well-suited to do anything.

The software was described as a "blank canvas" during implementation however calling it unintuitive is putting it lightly. In my experience, it take weeks to learn and even after grasping the core functions it was still a huge challenge to create meaningful dashboards and health scores out of the data. I've learned programming languages in less time. With the amount of time it takes, it would probably make more sense to create something yourself with Caspio, Airtable or knack. Those saas products are truly a blank canvas that will allow you to stand up your own environment if you're looking to build something from scratch.

The data syncing was a huge challenge. I was in charge of implementing and standing up our initial environment. The data integrations required constant maintenance and updating from the source (i.e. remapping columns, errors matching IDs). In my experience, after the initial set-up, data maintenance/syncing still took hours every month.

Buyer Beware

Overall Satisfaction with Totango