ConnectWise PSA vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

MSPs wanting to find a single system to fill all their needs. Businesses wanting to increase their ability to deal with tickets, with advanced management and KPI monitoring. Small IT business who need more than just a ticketing system and are looking to make the leap to a full PSA with integration options, client portal and advanced configuration.

This cloud is a good option for attracting large numbers of customers for mid-scale and large-scale organizations. However, it’s not suitable for small companies or startups due to its high cost. For use cases where real-time input from customers is taken and then processed on the cloud to give them output, this platform is a must.

Incentivized

• Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
• Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.

• Super fast set-up of the service from design through to production.
• Robust method of release management from sandbox, to test, to production.
• User access controls can be fine grain, which is great for GDPR requirements, limiting access to only necessary data.
• Simple api integrations with other third party systems
• Broad range of features and functionality
• Einstein search features provides faster information mining for our agents as they help to resolve customer requests.

Incentivized

• I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
• A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
• Better Knowledge base section.
• We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
• Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
• A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
• The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.

Incentivized

• A free trial would be extremely valuable to customers who are not able to commit to a full plan.
• The pricing of this program is not priced competitively with other similar services.
• Can be quite time consuming to maintain.
• Not user friendly if you aren’t tech savvy/familiar with software.

Incentivized

The product works awesomely. The only factors holding back a 10 star rating are some of the upgrades that I believe are necessary. Namely, active directory integration for the customer portal is a feature that is long overdue. AD integration on the technician side should also be made available for subscribers of the cloud hosted solution.

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.

ConnectWise has been great for our help desk. Over the years we have used it (5+), it has responded to community-sourced feedback and improved its product. I have always appreciated the support given when required, and overall the program has helped our service desk to become more efficient. The automated aspect, including workflow rules, has been an important part of our overall systems. When considering a help desk PSA, ConnectWise should not be overlooked.

Incentivized

I love that the Salesforce Service cloud provides all of the functionality that I need when implementing business processes for our customer support representatives. It even has enough functions and features that allow us to customize and expand upon our current processes, giving us the ability to go above and beyond what we've thought we could ever do. Using cases coupled with Salesforce's automation tools help ease the workload and keeps our data integrity intact.

Incentivized

We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.

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.

Overall, I love CW Manage. I think it is a great platform, but nothing is learned from saying "You're great!" So I will share 2 issues where I think improvement can be made. 1. There are times where service requests are closed inappropriately without explanation or warning which can be frustrating. I have learned that I must work extra hard to manage my open issues to ensure that they don't just disappear without resolution. 2. I recently found that I had mistakenly been charged $50 a month for a year for services I did not have. When I brought this to CW's attention, I was quickly given a credit memo and an apology, which was nice, but it was still annoying

Incentivized

Load times can be slow, but this is also based on how much customization you have done. We added a lot of custom fields which could cause additional slowness in loading. This was never anything that affected our overall efficiency. I did not notice that Service Cloud slowed down any of the systems we had it integrated with

Incentivized

The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."

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.

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

We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.

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

Thoroughly review the training at ConnectWise University BEFORE starting. Ask questions to other partners - there is a huge community that is more than willing to help. Lastly, I recommend getting ConnectWise Consulting to help - it's a BIG product, and the money you spend on consulting will pay for itself by helping you and your team get off to a running start (in the right direction)

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

Everyone but dynamics had holes in it. Dynamics is good, but it requires more development time. I spoke with some people that have CW and liked it. But when I inquired after our frustrations, I discovered they had a full time scheduling & logistics CW manager and the field people were using it purely like any other more simplistic ticket system. They said it would be impossible otherwise. The one big difference is the transparency of the sales effort. The other sales people were honest on the limitations or potential challenges and worked with us. They also worked with our agenda. At CW they don't have that option. The consulting time is eaten through a pre-formatted agenda which they communicate too you, not with you.

I honestly prefer Zendesk to Salesforce Service Cloud. I find that Zendesk is easier to manage both on the support ticket side, as well as the knowledge center side. It looks and feels easier to use than Salesforce Service Cloud. Salesforce Service Cloud is fine, but it is expensive as well.

Incentivized

ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.

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

• The positive impact is no one has to return to the office to look at notes - they can look up the support ticket on their laptop, tablet, or phone.
• The positive impact on ROI is keeping all of your support tickets organized in one spot and multiple techs can update them.
• The positive impact on ROI is that you have happier customers as you can update the support tickets no matter where you are at

Incentivized

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized