Desk.com (discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)

Desk.com and the Salesforce Service Cloud provide a sophisticated suite to easily create and track cases coming in, along with automatically routing and escalating issues as they arise. It allows me to configure my own workflows and customizes consoles with easy drag and drop functionality. It is the perfect help desk software, which integrates with the Salesforce Sales and Commerce clouds seamlessly. The in-app and mobile support is also very expedient and helpful.

Incentivized

[SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)] works well in education, I'm responsible for over 500 classrooms, thousands of users and computers. Using WHD to keep track of who has what devices and which devices need to be retired has helped the user experience. I'd recommend this product to anyone managing an IT department.

Incentivized

• Help Center. Desk has worked endlessly with us to perfect our Help Center. They are dedicated and willing to work in order to make your product right.
• Customization. Though we exceeded the rule limitation for Desk, they have still allowed us to take their product and make it our own. We have our own labeling, and priority system which help us hit important SLAs.
• User education. Whenever there is a new feature released, I feel like I'm in the know about it which is extremely important when we've been requesting certain features for a long period of time. Their communication is on point.

• Email notifications are pretty good; you can add hidden notes, close/resolve/update tickets just by selecting the appropriate link in the email that is sent when a ticket is created or edited.
• It provides a great deal of information to both the user and tech.
• It allows us to automatically update asset information with our mobile device management system by using an extension.

Incentivized

• Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
• Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
• Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
• Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
• Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless

Incentivized

• I have been a user for over 8 years and the product continues to exceed my expectations!
• I am amazed at the fact that the users have an impact on how the product continues to evolve
• Continued efforts put forth on the security of all the SolarWinds products have been amazing

Incentivized

We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products

Incentivized

We are definitely going to be sticking with Web Help Desk for the foreseeable future since the product is very inexpensive for the features that it provides, the integration that it has with our existing systems, and the ease for managing users, assets, locations, and tickets. Web Help Desk is a great product that is backed by even better support, which is well worth looking into if you are considering moving to a new ticketing system.

Incentivized

Once it is fully set up with all of the unique and necessary customizations for your organization, it becomes easier to use, but before that, it is not very user-friendly and there are not a lot of training resources available. You likely need a Salesforce admin for initial set-up who is experienced with customization.

Incentivized

It's not cloud based so users have to be on the network to submit a ticket. It doesn't plug into Google or Microsoft Azure so all inventory has to be manually entered. It seems like solar winds is allowing the product to slow fall into obsolescence

Incentivized

We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.

Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.

I always get the support and needed answers in a timely manner. Whether by email, ticket, or call. There's always a solution available or a potential one available. Everything is clear and straight to the point in customer support from Desk. I didn't face any difficulty so far with that.

Incentivized

SolarWinds is a great customizable and affordable ticketing system. We use SolarWinds Web Help Desk for IT and Software
Development trouble ticket tracking and resolution. The reporting that
SolarWinds provides is great since it helps us discover problem areas and fix
those areas so they don't keep reoccurring

Incentivized

As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.

Take the time to roll out a test VM to configure and make changes to before doing a live deployment, this way you don't end up with a VM that has been tweaked and re-tweaked until it's perfect and instead end up with a final, polished product. I would also recommend taking the time to read through the support forums for figuring out minor issues that may pop up, chances are that you aren't going to be the first one to encounter them. When all is said and done, SolarWinds Support is VERY responsive and you shouldn't hesitate to contact them.

Incentivized

Wix Answers was much better compared to Desk.com. It had more excellent and much better and more tools and was very customizable. Luckily it also had a search tool and also the sort and filter tools. The only thing better than Wix Answers on desk.com was that we could keep internal communication records by adding notes on tickets, and it saved a lot of time.

Incentivized

I used ManageEngine ServiceDesk and ServiceNow at previous jobs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk was in place when I came to this job and I was disappointed when I started using it as it has a more clunky, less intuitive interface, and lacks the features of those products. And it gets frustrating because sometimes it doesn't work right. Like I will open a ticket and click on the button to add a note and instead it will close the Notes section. So then I have to close and reopen the ticket and try again. Same with closing a ticket. I change the Status to "closed" and click on "Save" and it doesn't save. So I have to keep repeating this until it works. Also, it's lacking features like the ability to unmerge or split tickets, that I had in other products. And sometimes when users reply to tickets it creates another ticket instead of adding it to the existing ticket and then we have to merge tickets. Also, it's lacking the integration with users and assets that those other products have.

Incentivized

• It has definitely had a positive impact by helping our team quickly address issues people are having with our product.
• Desk.com has helped our team and company get better by addressing customer and tester issues faster, and tracking data so that our team can improve the quality and speed of all of our outgoing communications.

Incentivized

• Overall we have become more efficient using this tool and our ROI for implementing this has been great. By having a service tool that can manage inventory, tickets, as well as change management just to name a few, our company is better off in our support.
• The core business community has seen quicker responses to tickets through use of the ticketing tool. Business continuity has had less disruptions as we are better able to anticipate or respond to issues.
• Finance has been happier with our ability to do cost analysis by using the various tools in SolarWinds help desk.

Incentivized