Salesforce Service Cloud vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)

It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with

Incentivized

SolarWinds WHD is well suited if you have a limited budget, as it costs less than many help desk software packages that are more full featured and modern in their design. It is not well suited to an environment where you want to manage inventory, users, purchases and tickets all in one package. It has an asset feature that we don't use but that looks quite limited. We track our assets and users separately from this.

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• Customized reporting allows us to track our service and support better, and find where we need improvements. This allows us to constantly upgrade our service levels and keep the customers happy.
• Detailed tracking and response to the end users have led to quicker remediation of tickets. We are able to see where we need a better response or where to add additional resources for support.
• Overall metrics allow us to staff properly for our tickets by location and remote users.

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

• Because of AD integration, users sometimes try logging in with their email address and not AD credentials. The user then calls stating they can't put a ticket in, it would be nice if there was a method of matching the AD Email field with a login.
• Setting up new techs with the building they are responsible for can be a little messy
• I would like to see the UI updated. It looks old, even in the latest releases.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

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

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

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

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

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

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

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

Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions

Web Help Desk is definitely lacking in the UI/UX department compared to most other ticketing systems I have used int he past. It's very utilitarian; however, what it lacks in UI it makes up for in extensibility and customization. The main issue that the developers need to address is the use of a Web Objects back-end.

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
• The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
• Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
• Limited to annual subscription model

Incentivized

• Amazing impact on our Organization, we are much more organized since we implemented SolarWinds Web Help Desk
• The ROI is in the statistics! The application cost pennies to run compared to what the product will do for your organization.
• I challenge you to find a better product for the price!
• Our documentation has improved since we implemented SolarWinds Web Help Desk

Incentivized