Novade vs. ServiceMax

ServiceMax boasts that it runs natively on the SalesForce platform however, in reality, it functions less as a native component and more so as a confusing doppelganger that redirects your work at every turn from its intended output to something else entirely. Although it blends right into SalesForce on a surface level it is by no means seamless as it takes every frustrating or slow element of its host platform and amplifies them, seeming exponentially at times. This is of course until you'd like the ServiceMax components to differentiate themselves in some manner from elements that are actually native to SalesForce. For example, let's say you'd like to run a report of tickets pending review for invoicing but both SalesForce and ServiceMax's service platforms have the record types "Ticket" and "Invoice", what do you do? Well, you get to take part in what will soon become your new top housekeeping task, hours of trial and error until you stumble upon the magic combination of selections that might get you *most* of your data. In short, ServiceMax is...

1. Painfully slow - I wrote this review while waiting for it to update a single line in Price Book)
2. Inherently buggy
3. Unintuitive
4. Hopefully shortlived

• ServiceMax easily creates service tickets and tracking information.

Incentivized

• The offline sync is very buggy and has many limitations. Recovery of the sync if it fails because of technicalities is in many ways, unrecoverable and unexplainable by the user.
• No integration with Salesforce knowledge articles.
• Support is limited and usually not knowledgeable about their own products.

Incentivized

Engaged account management. Support is based worldwide but handoffs have not been too painful.

Incentivized

ServiceMax has an offline capability, and also integrates with our Salesforce side of business. At the time, Salesforce did not have a field service application so we could not consider it, but if we could now, we would probably go with that instead. ServiceMax is also expensive. But at the time, ServiceMax was the only offering out there that integrated with Salesforce, had mobile offline capability, and could operate at the scale we needed.

Incentivized

• We are able to track and easily report on the location of all our installed hardware to pinpoint issues.

Incentivized