We are very new to generating Conga Composer solutions in-house. We are a fundraising unit so, thus far, we are creating pledge reminders and account/contact briefing documents. All of this process used to be a manual seek-and-find process, and you can imagine how much time that process has consumed. Now, our researchers can produce a full briefing doc with the press of a button. I am still learning and have much to learn, but fully believe the sky is the limit in terms of productivity and efficiency gains to be made for our department.
Pros
If you have the know-how, Conga Composer can generate any template you can think of.
Conga Composer is powerful in its simplicity.
Customizations and parameters allow complex control over your templates.
Cons
The Conga Query Builder is not as robust as it could be. An example is the limiting of functions to only allow AND statements. If you want to include OR statements, you have to manually write and test them outside of the Query Builder.
Conga Composer is quite difficult to master while learning on your own.
The Conga Composer documentation should include more complete examples of syntax (especially for queries) and more fully include the steps to complete a given action.
Likelihood to Recommend
I'm early in my Conga Composer journey but, even in my limited experience, there is nothing it can't handle (within reason) and the sky's the limit. I have found it rather difficult to learn (most queries) as I'm learning on my own with the Conga Learning Center and YouTube videos.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use Conga Composer to generate numerous documents in bulk at our study abroad organization. For example, we generate visa documentation, unofficial transcripts, sales invoices, and enrollment confirmation for a single student or a batch. The documents are saved or email according to the process we set up. We took it a step further in recent years and can now do bulk processing via a list view, which is a huge time saver.
Pros
Bulk Document Creation
Ability to Use Reports for Data
Flexibility of Output File
Cons
Interface is outdated, looks like Salesforce Classic
Push updates
Less expensive training - I miss when it was free! Unfeasible for a nonprofit to pay $5,000 for a course.
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited: bulk document creations, especially when it needs to be saved to an individual record or output as a single bulk file.
Less appropriate: Complex billing scenarios
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Education Management company, 51-200 employees)
We use Conga Composer to streamline and automate the generation of complex proposals and contracts. The main business problems it addresses are the time-consuming and error-prone nature of manually creating these documents, especially when they require pulling data from multiple sources like Salesforce. Conga Composer allows us to automate this process, ensuring consistency and accuracy across our papers. The scope of our use case includes creating personalized customer proposals, generating contracts with dynamic content, and producing detailed sales reports. By integrating Conga Composer with Salesforce, we can pull real-time data, merge it into predefined templates, and generate polished documents with just a few clicks. This has significantly reduced the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing our team to focus more on strategic activities, and has improved our document creation process's overall efficiency and professionalism.
Pros
Customization
Integration with Salesforce.
Templated Proposals.
Cons
UI is a bit clunky.
Recalling proposals seems more difficult than it should be.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for small to mid-sized growth companies looking for a customization solution.
Our team uses Conga Composer to generate transcripts and award letters for our small graduate-level teacher preparation program. This product has dramatically reduced the time spent creating documents for our students. Because Conga is compatible with Salesforce, we can store our completed documents securely for easy archiving. We are happy with this product, particularly as a Salesforce integration.
Pros
Create document templates.
Streamline reporting.
Prepare documents for many recipients easily.
Cons
None.
Likelihood to Recommend
We only use Conga for transcripts and award letters now, but it suits our needs very well.
VU
Verified User
Director (Education Management company, 501-1000 employees)
We use Conga Composer for all of our invoice formats and Sales Credit notes. We are an international company and at this juncture have 80+ invoices templates that we manage in a variety of currencies. We find Conga Composer very easy to use once you learn the system. Making edits to the templates for changes in addresses or bank accounts is easy. Our users find generating the invoices to be very intuitive and they like that they can send to Excel to make specific client requested updates.
Pros
Ability to send invoices to Excel or directly to PDF
Pulls data from a variety of objects - accounts, SIN, project, etc.
Easy to update templates
Cons
Bit of a learning curve to understand how to update invoices - does take programmer or database admin type knowledge
It would be nice if bank account or our office locations could pull from the database so we could update these instead of every template
Likelihood to Recommend
We find the Conga invoices very intutitive to use once they are created. It does take a dba or someone familiar with database objects to create the invoice templates initially and to maintain them on an ongoing basis.
We are using Conga Composer to build labels for different events. On that case, Conga is helping us to design and print the labels on an easy way. It's easy to build different templates with that . For the whole users we have in the university, is used for almost all of them.
Pros
Labels
Design
Templates
Cons
Useless intuitive
More updates
More help on the website
Likelihood to Recommend
Is good suited to build labels, is an easy way, the users are happy with that. We need to improve the different manuals and support for that, some times we need to scalete a case in order to have some information of the product.
It seems that sometime is easier to buy a product already done than create a new custom one. On that case, Conga fits with our necessities.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (Education Management company, 501-1000 employees)
We use Conga for our Contract Lifecycle Management - from generating an order form, sending contracts for signature, approving red-lines, and everything else involved in contracts.
Pros
It is positive that Conga integrates with and is operated within SFDC
Conga allows users to tag any document with dynamic fields that map to SFDC and send it out for signature
Conga allows us to consistently produce quotes with the correct SKUs, Terms, & conditions at scale
Cons
Conga Composer's base contract does not come with Support; so when you run into a product issue, you are stuck
In my experience, Conga often takes a long time to complete user actions like generating a quote e.g. they sometimes click 'Generate Quote' and then have to wait a couple of minutes before they can move on to the next step
In my opinion, it's not intuitive how to manage Conga as an admin - it's not clear how to provision licenses or deactivate users
Likelihood to Recommend
We ended up in an expensive multi-year contract without Support included which has rendered the product useless - it is not a simply-to-use, self-service platform
VU
Verified User
Director in Sales (E-Learning company, 51-200 employees)
Conga Composer and Collaborate were used to automate rather fickle documents that needed a lot of fields modified on the fly. Conga allowed us to use templates that had pre-configured fields that would be pulled directly from Salesforce in order to save time with the actual creation process of the document. For templating purposes, CongaSign and Collaborate worked exceedingly well.
Pros
Templates
Automation
Multiple Configurations
Supporting Multiple Users
Salesforce Integration
Cons
Speed - can be slow to load.
UI can be clunky
Sometimes things break.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a sales team that has several sales departments or has a sales team with many different functions that need to be able to quickly generate contracts of multiple types on the fly, CongaSign and Collaborate are good options. You will have to spend some time with engineering to get it properly configured, however, and it does have a learning curve for less tech-savvy users.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Sales (E-Learning company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use Conga Composer as our mail merge product in conjunction with Salesforce. Printed correspondence is still of value to us when communicating with parents and prospective college students. Our mailing vary from single letters to multi page/document packets that are mailed with binding admission decisions. Conga Composer allows us to create this correspondence and also to log the activity in the student's individual Salesforce record. We are primarily using it with the Office of Admission; however, we communicate to over 10.000 applicants each year.
Pros
Allows for logging of activities to student records.
Create multi page/multi document packets.
Mail merge capabilities.
Cons
It has improved over the years but there are times when the reports run slowly.
I would like to see more of an email functionality.
Online tutorials.
Likelihood to Recommend
Conga works well for us when it comes to personalizing each student's admit packet. The packet of information can have on average 4 pages of personalized information based on a particular status of the application or certain attributes coded in the student's salesforce record. We are able to streamline the process of printing large scale jobs.
I work at a university and Conga Composer is being used by our admissions office to generate print mail to send to prospective students. We currently are generating and sending about 30 different documents via Conga Composer.
Pros
Merge data directly from Salesforce! No need to export data and merge in a separate source.
Automatically store details in the Contact's Activity History so that you can see who has received what documents.
Very easy to create basic document templates and relatively easy to learn even some of the more advanced options.
Ability to generate a document for one particular person OR for a group of people defined via Salesforce Report, Campaign, or SOQL query.
Cons
If processing a document for a large group of people the process can sometimes be slow and sometimes freeze.
Likelihood to Recommend
Conga Composer is particularly well suited for cases in which you are generating a particular document on a recurring basis. It is not as well suited for one off letters.
