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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Zoho Desk
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Zoho Support is a Saas help desk / ticketing system aimed at SMBs. I competes most often with Zendesk, and Desk.com.
$0
Pricing
Parature (Discontinued)
Zoho Desk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0
Express
$9
per month per user
Standard
$20
per month per user
Professional
$35
per month per user
Enterprise
$50
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Parature (Discontinued)
Zoho Desk
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
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A discount is offered for yearly billing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Parature (Discontinued)
Zoho Desk
Features
Parature (Discontinued)
Zoho Desk
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Parature (Discontinued)
-
Ratings
Zoho Desk
8.6
Ratings
7% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets
00 Ratings
8.90 Ratings
Expert directory
00 Ratings
7.90 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
00 Ratings
7.90 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation
00 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
00 Ratings
8.50 Ratings
Ticket response
00 Ratings
8.50 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Parature (Discontinued)
-
Ratings
Zoho Desk
8.8
Ratings
11% above category average
External knowledge base
00 Ratings
8.80 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
00 Ratings
8.80 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
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!
Zoho Desk is a great customer service tool. It is very easy to track the ability to receive tickets and send responses in Zoho Desk. There are lots of options for customization. The knowledge base feature is very extensive and powerful. It makes creating internal and external FAQs easy.
Report features give the all insights of the customer team and customer support which enables us to make changes according to it.
The best thing about Zoho Desk is that it has a very beautiful and fully designed dashboard.
I have been using this software for a very long time in my organization, it is very easy to use with having the interface created on a very advanced module.
When utilizing as a ticketing system, it would be nice to have a better way to monitor when something is due. It's just a little cumbersome.
Search Functionality - The search functionality could use a tweak or two. Too many times I am unable to find tickets. This would also be very helpful for the "Recycle Bin" when you just need to find that ticket you accidentally deleted (we are all human!). :)
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.
Zoho Desk on operational capacity is the most effective help desk we have come across, as it is suitable for businesses of all forms and shapes, from large to small. Again, Zoho Desk captures the attention of all clients, and on time, offers solutions to their demands without failing. Lastly, Zoho Desk requires no extra skill to execute the program.
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.
Their support is excellent. They are always available to answer all your queries and doubts. Be it a call or email or even live chat. You will always get a prompt response from their customer support executives. They are very much familiar with the product and all its functionality. Sometimes you get stuck and don’t know what to do. They are always there for your questions
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 easily a winner for trouble ticket handling as Bitrix24 was not offering any dedicated trouble ticketing tool and we had no option but to use the Tasks section of Bitrix24 to handle our existing customers. Also Bitrix24 neither did have any dedicated mobile application for on the go usage which Zoho Desk has easily handled with applications for both Android and IOS devices.
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.
By running reports based on ticket, we can see how much time is spent on each customer and can manage these customers better based on what we see are there issues
We can also run reports based on the types of queries customers are coming in with which allows us to develop our product based on actual customers needs as a whole.
Automatic reporting once set up saves many man hours as new customers can be added automatically if required, and it saves having to build these reports monthly or possibly weekly