Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017.
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SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
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SAP Service Cloud helps deliver customer value and protect the brand with intelligent customer service. It enables the user to engage with customers at their convenience, connect service with the value chain and deliver greater profitability.
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!
SAP Service Cloud is well suited with its omni-channel capabilities giving the possibility to collect service requests from different channels like phone, e-mail or CTI telephony. It also has nice User Interface (when it comes to desktop version). On the other hand SAP Service Cloud needs to be definitiely improved in terms of mobile app, which is horrible and it has limited development possibilities.
Integrating SAP Service Cloud with non-SAP systems can be challenging, i faced some hurdles when my IT team took 3 months to integrate the billing data from some other vendor and the system would run slow if you try to pull billing data
Slow loading of the pages as compared to other consumer tech softwares we use
Implementation costs and complexity of implementation makes it an option only for large enterprises with huge IT teams (and it can take a few months to implement)
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.
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.
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.
I have found that sometimes issues reported to the SAP takes more time also they lack system support with respect to the priority . Also we don't see RCA for the issues raised. Also turn around time for the issues is not fixed as the support is global sometimes the issues float here and there.
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.
Zoho Desk is the ultimate software for clear communication, but when we compared these two according to our needs, we found out that SAP Service Cloud is the best option for us. Since it provides everything in one location, Zoho Desk is somewhat lacking in this area. That was the reason for choosing SAP Service Cloud.
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.
After implementing SAP Service Cloud, we've noticed a noticeable drop in the average time it takes to resolve customer queries. Centralized communication and an efficient ticketing system enable our team to respond faster and more effectively.
Our customer feedback scores have improved since using the platform. The integrated knowledge base has particularly empowered our team to provide immediate solutions to common queries, elevating the overall customer experience.
The platform has streamlined our operations and reduced manual interventions, leading to decreased operational costs related to customer service. Automation features and AI integrations minimize repetitive tasks, allowing our team to tackle more complex customer concerns.
