A Story of Shooting for the Moon, Falling Short, and Settling into a Declining Orbit
Pros
- It has a very nice graphical/visual display of metrics/KPIs that are fed into it.
- It has a fantastic meetings agenda and communication module that helped better connect our geographically distributed offices.
- It solved the problem we had of using several different platforms for each need - providing a central place for results-orientated information sharing and discussion.
Cons
- Like all BI software, the pretty graphics and charts and information are only as accurate as what is put into the system. It does not have parameters that will flag suspect data, which became a problem as our data sources increased and the results.com integration required more and more results.com-side development.
- The promise of having the corporate mission/vision/values/etc. all connected to individual priorities and associated KPIs never came to pass. Being early adopters, we purchased partly on the promises of salespeople. As time marched on, support and development dropped off in favor of increasing their sales department.
- We believe, through our experience with results.com, that the company was built to sell quickly. That is, we believe the owner/s blasted through their funding in the first year to onboard as many users as possible so they could increase value for a quick sale. Then we believe that when the money was mostly spent, and there was no sale, the company had to become a normal, profitable, long-term business which led to expense cutting, a RIF of developers and customer support, and the resulting slowdown/stoppage/inability to develop and support the product. Our feeling in the last months on the platform was one where it seemed the employees/owners were unhappy and disgruntled to have to actually run it as a business and deal with customers. (This is our guess and belief based on what we saw over time and without any knowledge whatsoever on what was actually happening over there.)
Return on Investment
- We did not utilize a BI dashboard nor a standardized meeting agenda system before results.com so in that respect, it helped us establish a results/performance-orientated culture which was badly needed.
- Unfortunately, beyond that first year, results.com didn't keep up with our struggles with data imports. That, combined with the inability for us to see direct ROI $ increases, led us to eventually leave the platform. Unfortunately, they locked us into a longer term (even without providing promised services) and so we technically were on the system (but not using it) for 6+ months past the date where we'd all agreed it was not useful for anyone anymore.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Sisense
Other Software Used
Sisense, Smartsheet