HCL Sametime vs. Talkdesk

Overall, Sametime is a great feature for global teams to communicate, since you can chat quickly and efficiently with Sametime. Also, the file transfer is really fast and it downloads to any folder you choose. The chat history is easy to use and it is easy to find keywords. The feature of creating "emoticons" sometimes can jeopardize the team's efficiency.

Incentivized

Talkdesk does an excellent job with productivity reports. I can monitor my agent's lives during calls and their current status, allowing me to affect them productively at that moment. I can also download a productivity report on Talkdesk to analyze historical data and see patterns and problems.

Incentivized

• The license cost is comparatively low so almost all staff have it installed in our company. We can use it to contact all internal staff.
• It’s light and fast with almost no downtime. It also provides easy to use APIs for the user to build automation process on it. We have an internally built robot running on Sametime to answer frequently asked questions and do some repetitive tasks.
• Chat history can be saved as per user’s preference and it is easy to be searched.

Incentivized

• Receives calls immediately and connects well.
• Making outbound calls and having Talkdesk display the name associated with the number.
• Aux on break, lunch, or meeting, and it stays as it is and does not change status on its own.
• Being able to check on colleagues on whether they are available.
• Able to track your work for the day, the amount of calls you made and received.
• Being able to check your Daily and monthly score from QA.

Incentivized

• The mobile app is not that great for anything outside of straight up messaging.
• We tried video chatting within Sametime without any real success. There were connection issues and the app would crash quite often. We switched to another product and had no problems.
• IBM Sametime just looks outdated. The menus and contact list are not up to date from a UX perspective compared to many other popular chat apps.

Incentivized

• The core maintenance, migration and deployment of Voice prompts, functions alongwith flow changes is crucial and is a key missing feature. Development in Production was a shocker and led to lot of confusion and limitation during the implementation and testing.
• The AI feature is not as supported and reliable in Non English language
• The Support team seems very lean to handle heavy loads of issue thereby delaying the resolution of the issue. One of our critical issue took almost 2 months to resolve which could have been handled better by proactively driving the issue from talkdesk end.
• The support ticket does not have any escalation process. It needs to add the severity/ impact to number of agents and have people to support escalation especially involving Call Quality/network/Reporting/storage

Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.

Incentivized

Talkdesk is an enterprise grade solution for telephony service. Zendesk eould be the only other option in terms of solutions I have implemented and seen in practice. It is easy for business users to learn how to use talkdesk and develop call routing paths dependong on the nature of the customer's request

Incentivized

Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.

Incentivized

It's good for monitoring and quality checking. Overall, I'm happy with Talk Desk. Call quality is great, recordings are high quality, and playback has no issues. Administrator features are well-designed. Talkdesk is a great platform for our Customer support. It has many features and is an omnichannel platform. I like the IVR design the most; it has a lot of functionality to customise interactions between agents and customers.

Incentivized

Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.

Incentivized

Talkdesk is very handy but, sometimes we do face issues were the system can just kick you out and not be able to do calls or receive calls but, what I like about the system once you start refreshing or troubleshooting, everything becomes normal it is a unique system and very modern we don't usually have system issues with Talkdesk.

Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish

Incentivized

I give this system a full 10/10 once you refresh or troubleshoot you do not wait for too long to use it . It easy like ABC . I honestly recommend this system, even when you check the QA score card, you do not have to wait that long; you just click on the notification bell and view your score card.

I have to use support for many customers. However, support is generally quite responsive and continues to see an issue through to resolution and I would recommend using their knowledgeable and well-trained staff.

Incentivized

If Talkdesk had a dedicated phone support line I would have given this rating an overall 10. Their knowledge base is absolutely HUGE and at times very helpful. It's easy to search through and their customer support chat system works perfectly fine, but there are just some times that you need to speak to a human on the phone to ensure you are always on the same page.

The training that was given to us was very smooth and professional. I give my trainer 10/ 10 rate the training was so smooth and very helpful she would make sure we also watch videos of how to use the system which made it very easier for us and what was interesting it is because, the system is also easy.

Nothing is perfect!! Needing the ability to repeat the training so everyone was on board was important. Not real sure how many people had to repeat the training as they trained on their own and given 30 minutes at a time.

Incentivized

Really easy to get set up out of the box. Anything I needed to understand further, I was able to just hop into the Academy and self-teach. I could then bring my team-members to those same sections so they could learn as well without me having to put together complicated SOP's / etc

Incentivized

Text chat is text chat. It's not a technically hard problem to solve. It's when you try and move out of text chat into more fully featured applications that allow for audio or video calling, transcripts, etc, it becomes apparent that the developers on Sametime gave up a long time ago. In my organization, Slack has nearly completely replaced Sametime for any and all purposes that Sametime used to fulfill.

Incentivized

Call recordings, quality assessments, feedback, coaching, and monitoring, the call flow is effortless and painless, changing statuses from after-call work is updated to be qued so you cannot change after aftercall work is finished, shows you the company metrics, SLA, abandonment, number of calls taken and record occupancy for you and the team. Many more features make Talkdesk an innovative software compared to its competitors.

Incentivized

Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.

Incentivized

We have over 200 employees in 11 states across the United States. Everyone uses Talkdesk. I believe that says a lot about the product and its flexibility. We need to be able to rely on system in order to assist our customers. Reliability and sustainability is important to our success

Incentivized

• HCL Sametime is affordable thus it is cost-efficient for instant messaging compared to costs of phone calls, especially overseas calls.
• As Sametime is integrated with Lotus Notes it is convenient to use both of these together without separately using them.
• Still need to pay for other apps for effective video conferencing and webinar.

Incentivized

• Better reporting than we had with the previous system. Better metrics = better analytics.
• WFM and QA being modules within the tool have improved how we manage agent performance, which has let to improvements in overall quality.
• Has been a key component as we continue to mature the service desk organization.

Incentivized