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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Zendesk Suite
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Zendesk is a customer support solution with built-in ticketing, conversational messaging, and live chat, designed to help businesses of all sizes and industries deliver personalized service at scale. Zendesk's AI agents are trained in CX to help Service teams resolve customer issues faster and more accurately while still providing a human-centered experience. Zendesk ultimately aims to help businesses improve time to value, reduce effort per ticket, and keep costs low.
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!
Benefits of Zendesk Suite: Support across channels In the case of a retail company with chat, email, WhatsApp and social DMs all piling up together, agents do not have to change tabs - everything comes into one screen in the Suite. An example could be a representative for this e-commerce company on a sale weekend when they have live chat up, and also must deal with emails and complaints on social. Zendesk Suite handled all of this interaction seamlessly. Knowledge base + self service: A SaaS platform receiving constant flow of "how do I reset my password" questions. You set up a help centre once, and are able to deflect hundreds of tickets for months and years. Even better when combining with Answer Bot, where the bot begins suggesting articles without even a human interacting with the tickets. Scaling customer service teams: A startup that has just expanded from 5 customer service representatives to 50 customer service representatives. Zendesk Suite automates routing, SLAs, macros, and analytics, when it could never work with Google Workspace + sticky notes. This is especially helpful when managers want to be able to report or analyze ticketing conversations to see trends in perhaps their backlog, or a customer service representative is running into consistent workflows. Globalization: A company with support teams that are spread across time zones and languages. Zendesk Suite enables for business hours, language packs, and localized help centers. It even comes with routing either by skill or region
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.
Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.
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.
I used to work without a ticketing service, and everything was handled on an email provider, this made it very difficult to track, no integrations to the software complicating the use of internal tools or other software like Guru, Zendesk Suite wasn't hard to learn, in fact it was very easy, very straightforward, and I was an admin learning to use several tools at the same time.
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.
We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request
Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
There is not a lot of implementation, it's all setup and you just start using it. We did do some email to ticket setup and that worked really well. The only thing that didn't work for us was the Salesforce integration, maybe your mileage will vary.
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.
Even these two have a ticketing system but that I also used previously but Zendesk Suite has a very clear ticketing system - it does not take much time to understand and use it, the interface is easy and the automation system also works up to the expectation, it is not just easy for the users but for us from the backed support as well, it is so user-friendly.
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.
Customer Success looks at ticket resolution surveys as part of their CSAT scores and either thanks their customer for a positive review or reaches out if it's a negative review.
Sales uses Zendesk to make sure their new prospects are getting POCs properly set up quickly and fix any issues while they do a trial of our tool.
Onboarding uses Zendesk to quickly make sure new customers implementations and user access are set up to help them start implementation faster.
