Parature (Discontinued) vs. TeamSupport

Parature earns a "7" on my rating scale because it fits the bill for a ticketing solution. While it is not the most powerful utility I have come across, it is fairly user friendly and gets the job done. There is quite a bit of room for customizing the interface, but it comes with a learning curve. A score of "7" reflects what I would tell anyone who is looking for feedback on this application; it's better than a majority of the market share, but still has room to grow!

Incentivized

How many departments will be using TeamSupport and how many "Groups" will I therefore need to create? The answer will impact how much you are spending on TeamSupport. The same goes for individual employees who use it. Additionally, you should ask how important uptime is and get assurance on how quickly issues will be resolved if there is downtime from TeamSupport during business hours. Finally, you should ask how the reporting component will meet your needs.

Incentivized

• Syncs all support emails into cases that can the be prioritized, monitored, and tracked.
• Provides easy canned responses to common support questions helping save time.
• Provides live chat.

Incentivized

• Ease of Use. TeamSupport is very well laid out and is obviously being designed by people that have their customers in mind. I can find what I need quickly and have found none of the customizable features to be confusing.
• TeamSupport supports their clients well. Anytime I need help, they are an email or phone call away and I receive prompt, if not immediate assistance.
• TeamSupport integrates with our Salesforce CRM well. The integration was as easy as entering a token and then choosing the fields I want to sync to Salesforce. The initial import of data from Salesforce did not give me all of my customers, but that was because of how I had Salesforce set up and after talking to TeamSupport and making a few changes, we restarted the data import and it has been smooth sailing ever since. Now my Sales Staff can see what is happening on the ticket side of their accounts without having to ask, because TeamSupport automatically updates Cases in Salesforce. Very well done feature.

Incentivized

• Implementation- I think they have worked on improving this since we launched
• Custom requests
• Perhaps an interface with other business systems

Incentivized

• I would be interested in seeing a way to sort tickets under 2 filters. Example: I'd love to be able to sort my tickets oldest to newest - AND - by customer within the first filter.
• I would also like to be able to customize my user profile. I think it would be cool to be able to change colors and formats.
• I love TeamSupport!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The software is easy to use and more than fulfills our minimum requirements for a tech support database tool. TeamSupport is constantly adding new features, both that they identified themselves and that were directly requested by TeamSupport users. One of the most important things that a company does is communicate with its customers, especially when there is a problem. While we would all prefer to never have any down time, that just isn't possible. So when something happens it is critical you keep your users informed of what is going on and how long it will take to fix things. TeamSupport gets an A+ when it comes to keeping customers informed. You can make the answers in your tickets available in an FAQ. Obviously, the longer you stick with TeamSupport, the more complete and useful the FAQ will be for your customers

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.

Incentivized

I think some things could be a little more user-friendly: specifically the dashboard. Although it's fantastic and makes life so much nicer, I'd like to have more control on it's customization. I'd like to be able to default what's collapsed and what's expanded...instead of everything expanding by default each time I load it. But the portal offers great tools and guides on workarounds.

They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.

Incentivized

Again while most of the time I CAN access your server, it's offline enough that I can't count on having the software available to me 24/7

It is a feature heavy web application, thus speed can be compromised sometimes dependent on availability of a quality internet connection

Nothing ever seemed to get resolved

Incentivized

TeamSupport's communication for service issues/maintenance are always visible. They also offer many opportunities for training on the software via webinar. Additionally, their support team has been available for coaching and guidance on how to use the software more effectively. They also offer training on creating customized reports to suit our specific organizational needs.

Incentivized

Able to get hands on training and ask questions.

Not much training was offered, but it was always provided when we requested it

Data import was the most difficult hurdle for us to get over. The mass import was handled through an Excel spreadsheet. TeamSupport doesn't use Microsoft Office products for the most part so they were relying on Google Docs which has limitations over Excel. Special characters and html in import cells can be a issue with importing. When creating a data export from your current system, special care needs to be taken so that the data is able to be processed into TeamSupport without issues.

Incentivized

Before choosing Parature we reviewed many of the currently available solutions before building our short list of Parature, SugarCRM, Zendesk, Salesforce, and NetSuite. In the end, the licensing models for Salesforce and Netsuite eliminated them from consideration. The SugarCRM solution was our current solution, and didn't appear to be a key area of focus for Sugar (though we continue to use SugarCRM for everything except the Ticketing feature). Zendesk lacked the Download Module feature which is a critical element of our deployment. In the end, it was Parature that addressed all of the needs we identified and did so in a single, hosted solution. It was also one of the least expensive to deploy and maintain.

Incentivized

We have looked into Zendesk and previously moved from Axosoft to TeamSupport. TeamSupport is definitely better than Axosoft when it comes to fuctionality and ease of use. Zendesk is probably the best and widely used but of course that comes with a price. If the organization is big and a larger customer base, then is makes sense to use Zendesk.

Incentivized

TS keeps adding new features without making sure the program is reliable as-is. The program is frequently offline which makes for significant frustration on my part

• Positive: everything is housed in one place, we are paperless and we are efficient.
• Negative: the bugs of this product make the above equally as frustrating. Also, some people don't use it correctly and going back and fixing their mistake is time-consuming. The reporting feature are also pretty flawed.

Incentivized

• When we first began using TeamSupport we were also preparing for an important review of our software product. Of course, our customer service was being evaluated also. We had about 80 people involved in our review and comments about our customer service came back excellent every time. One of our main goals is to provide exceptional customer support, but we could not have done it without TeamSupport.

Incentivized