Tracker Beyond our expectations

We have been using Tracker as our customer support interface with our customers for over 5 years now. It gives us the ability to evolve the interactive relationship between the Support staff and our customers. Multiple reports, both standard and custom have given up the insight into the issues that our customers see while using our products in their day to day operations. It has helped to provide direction of our product growth while addressing the needs of the customer. From an internal prospective, it gives a real time look at the performance and through put of our organizations. Helping to identify areas for improvement as well as staffing requirements for short term relief as well as long term growth. Tracker on Demand and Tracker Beyond have helped to make the relationship with our customers a more manageable one with historical data and real time look at their needs.

Pros

Easy to use for new hires to come up to speed quickly.

Cons

Some of the features from Demand were not ported over to Beyond. the ability to see past viewed tickets. The screen roles as you scroll up and down the journal entries. the search screen doe snot always clear out and some times you need to clear individual fields manually.

Excellent Customer Support / Helpdesk

We looked at twenty different products over the course of about nine months before narrowing the field to four. This was not our first helpdesk software purchase but I wanted it to be our last. We are software developers so we have our own ideas about how things should work. ;>) We had built a pretty formidable wish list and it grew a bit while we reviewed products. PhaseWare Tracker handles everything on our list and does it without compromise.

Pros

Customer (web) Self Service Center. incident submission automatically searches knowledge base and suggests PERTENANT articles. Competing products do this but we have not seen any do it well.

Knowledgebase that inserts itself into the process but doesnt get in the way. Building the KB is very easy to do in the course of resolving incidents.

Very flexible tracking of contacts, contracts and time. We have resellers and end users. Tracker handles incidents submitted by either party and keeps everyone up to date.

Theyll host Tracker or let you put it on your own server. They have desktop, browser and smartphone versions.

We have not found any aspect of the program that we could not tweak. Users can modify reports, database (MS SQL), most screens in the application and the customer support center.

The system handles emails quite well. screen shots, file attachments and hyperlinks, etc.

Cons

We spent more time than we should have before going live. This really isnt PhaseWares fault. Its only listed as a CON because I wish their manual had an introduction that said Dive in; you can tweak it later.

In retrospect we also should have stuck more to their training (included with purchase) rather than digging in on our own but being in the SW biz we thought we could learn their stuff faster than they could learn ours. We were wrong. They have an incredible knack for understanding the many and varied ways people want to do business.

Great System for Tracking Support

I like the ability to use the system to track the support that various teams provide within our organization. With a few hours of training, it is easy to pick up and use. The different types of report that can be customized and tailored to my needs is the biggest value for this system. I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to keep their support services centralized and track the type and level of support that their teams provide.

Pros

The ability to track support provided. The types of reports that can be produced and customized to track the support.

Cons

I feel that it lacks the ability to upload multiple attachments to incidents at once. You have to create a new journal entry for each attachments that you attempt to upload to an incident. When forwarding or replying to a response - it does not track it in the system like an email message so it's hard to forward the message again since it doesn't display the header of when the previous message was sent using Outlook plug-in.

Great way to capture and document your internal issues

The ability to track employees and responses makes this a great tool for us to reach out to end users and retrain/hire as needed.

Pros

The ability to create multiple departments, SLAs, and agents is a big bonus in this tracker program. It allows you to create reports based on users, departments, and issues. When you're falling behind in SLA, you can run the report and figure out the trend as to what/how/why and train or hire accordingly. I love being able to go back and explain to a user what happened and how I can fix it based on the information captured in the incident.

Cons

The ability to customize additional fields can be improved. The amount of time it takes to delete unrelated information such as images from an email that isn't necessary, etc. Also, unable to attach multiple images and screen shots in one go makes this a little more time consuming.

So far we have been very pleased with the performance of the product and the company.

So far we have been very pleased with the performance of the product and the company. Based on their quick response and willingness to implement customer feedback we expect the product will improve further and continue to exceed expectations. Tracker was less costly and far more valuable than our previous ticketing solution.

Pros

The PhaseWare team was responsive to every special need and request that we made, including some significant customizations to the program. They even set up a custom demo installation on their own servers, and left it active for testing and training during our entire implementation period. Every member of their team was intelligent, personable, and provided great customer service.

PhaseWare handles Tracker support using its own software - something we were surprised to find that some competitors don't do-- and their Self Service Center is highly usable with active community forums and great downloadable documentation. They include a Suggestions forum, and the newest version of Tracker includes many of those suggestions.

The software is scalable and reliable, and provides us flexibility to make changes that fit our workflow and reporting needs.

Cons

The Self Service Center is a bit blocky looking "out of the box" and is missing some features that are offered by many competitors (like "email this article" and "print" links, and rich text formatting in the knowledgebase). Creating "canned" responses and template incidents requires administrator level access, and the method of adding the canned snippets to support incidents in progress is cumbersome. No ability to manually sort field values or lists of downloads, FAQs, etc-- nearly all display alphabetically. There are limited tools available for ad hoc reporting/querying - the report designer requires programming knowledge.

This tool is very useful and keeps work orders (incidents) on track and visible.

This tool is very useful and keeps work orders (incidents) on track and visible to the people who initiated the work order and the personnel assigned to perform tyhe work order. Reporting is great and comprehensive. The ease of use using the web portal made even the computer illiterate feel comfortable. This is a great product and the support staff are very good at in thier roles and will help the customer out any way possible.

Pros

After setup, it was easy to install (web GUI), train, and use. Users were adding work orders and the PhaseWare tracker alerts are keeping me up to date and I was able to respond quickly, and assign the work order to a technician. Using the Journal entries was great because it kept the customer up to date on thier work order and allowed efficent reporting for inquiries about a particular work order. Setup was decent and the administrative documentation met most of our needs to fulfill our requirements. Any other questions were answered quickly and efficiently by the PhaseWare support personnel. The report templates are easy to use after going through them to see which template worked the best. After further investigation, I was able to create reports based on my favorite searches which is a breeze to define. The web portal is great and easy to use. I really like to email setup as well to let me know what's going on and reminding me when a work order is due or to follow up.

Cons

This was not really a con, but the first intial training session was a little confusing and jumped around a bit. I think that was in part to our company asking questions while the trainer was walking us through the application. I would reccommend a beginning to end approach for the training. The trainer was very gracious and patient with our questions.

Great value and support

PhaseWare had all of the features my agency was looking for right out of the box. We needed a hosted solution. The price was affordable and competitive with the many other business solutions.

Pros

They have deep features that we could not find elsewhere, even in products costing 2-3 times as much. For example, we sell software, and Tracker gives us the ability to relate solution providers (resellers of our software) to our end users, the retailers. We can easily respond to either party and keep the other party in the loop. Either party can log into the self-service center to see their stuff.

Cons

No complaints. The product does what we need it to do, and support is excellent.

PhaseWare Review

The customer service is great, always responsive. It would be helpful if the product included integration with other helpdesk products.

Pros

It's integrated with email and configurable

Cons

email integration includes signature icons as attachments which adds to the # of journals

I've been a PhaseWare Tracke user since the initial software release.

Pros

My organizations have used Tracker to operate a 24 hour international help desk and another for client management and services. The system has always been solid and rich with functionality. I am forever loyal to this brand as it continues to evolve with the times and always offers my companies the latest in technology and client management. The Directors have a proven record, excel in customer satisfaction, and lead their industry in anticipating new enhancements and upcoming trends.

Cons

In the 10 years that I have worked with Phaseware, I have no complaints. I frequently recommend their products and services to my associates.

Overall a very solid product.

Overall a very solid product. The initial setup of the specific parameters for your company takes some thought and time. However, once this is done the maintenance of the product is easy. We have not had a major technical issue with the product since it has been in production.

Pros

This software was purchased to replace an exisiting Help Desk software product. Phase Ware Tracker was purchased with certain qualities in mind.

Foremost was a product that serve as a communication tool between end users and technicians. Tracker handles the task easily with automatically generated emails between users and technicians initiated with journal entries.

Second, we needed a product that would automate a series of tasks initiated by a single user. Tracker's workflow process help us in this regard.

Customer support has been excellent. Phase Ware uses its own product for their own customer support. The customer support representatives have been very helpful and timely in their responses. I have never had a problem getting an issue resolved.

Cons

The user manual is very terse and it reads more like a developer manual. There is not a lot of explanation about how to perform certain key functions.

Rather, the manual explains functions of the software but not how those function integrate to the whole. Perhaps a rewrite of the user manual with on emphasis on how to do certain common tasks.

PhaseWare functionality

PhaseWare helps us organize and coordinate responses to customer problems. I also helps organize our projects internally. It will remind us if an issue has been overlooked.

Pros

The ability to see a list of unfinished products. The ability to track the progress of projects and determine what step to do next. Also, the ability to retrieve data and documents about a project a year later.

The system meet the daily needs of my department. I love having one work queue visible to my team.

Pros

I love the visibility of my team having the ability to see and work out of one queue. The ability to have access to multiple queues is also a feature I love. There are times when I need to access queues for other departments and I'm able to do so with ease. I also love the ability to be able to track a file by different parameters within the system.

Cons

I thought as modern technology continued to evolve the system update and layout would look more updated. I thought the visibility and layout would look more up to date.