VanillaSoft

Vorteile: Responsive and knowledgeable internal customer support and top notch staff interactions. Google calendar integration allows you to set appointments with confidence that the representative (external agent) will be available for them! Automatic timezone allocation for prospect records which allows appointments to be set for representatives who operate nationwide with no manual accounting for timezone needed; the software is nearly goof proof in calendaring considerations. Unlimited projects allowed and robust customization ensures that every project/marketing campaign is uniquely set up to meet your company or client's needs. I really appreciate the ability to customize result codes and the fact that you are not regulated to rigid categories or outcome processes. Each result can trigger multiple functions and this gives the administrator the power to control and maintain appropriate routing of prospects with minimal user effort. A decent dashboard system and intuitive reporting creation.

Nachteile: My top complaint has to be with the WYSIWYG editor for scripts and email templates, it is sufficient. However, in the NEW VS interface pasting text with from Google Docs or Word invariably produces an error (complete hang on selecting that script, only fixable by reverting to previous version interface) if the document was over a page long, unless pasted as plain text. Even if the original document has all formatting removed prior to copying. I would greatly appreciate a fix for this and support for pasting simple formatting options without errors.

Vorteile: The company is extremely responsive to customer needs and support requests. When I started my company I needed a scalable CRM with a calendar solution for outside sales reps. Vanillasoft fit the bill in all respects for our niche utilization and blew all other options out of the water in terms of ease of configuration and use. Initially there wasn't an option to auto sync calendars with outside software. About six months after I submitted this as a suggestion, we had a working gmail synchronization capability at no development cost to us.

Nachteile: I am going to ignore the obvious inconvenience that is inherent to hosted services infrequent but nevertheless frustrating slowdowns or communication errors with the hosted server. The only actual disappointment I've had is also something I am sure this is a common problem across all vendors of SAAS solutions: updates and changes. While I love the constant effort at increasing functionality and streamlining usability, I simultaneously hate updates because my user base finds learning new procedures on the fly very challenging. There were several updates that affected my users which came as a surprise with no warning before or change log notification after. We had a few frantic hours of complete chaos. Also due to our company structure Vanillasoft is our sole avenue of completing work and we use the majority of its features quite intensely, so naturally if there is a bug in the new features... I will be the one to find it. There is however an upside at the end of this which supports what I said earlier about responsiveness. After requesting some kind of upgrade notes, all future upgrades have been well documented in advance. The most recent large scale remodel has the ability to switch back and forth between new and old versions and this has given me the ability to prepare my users for the inevitable permanent change over to the newest iteration.