I know, their business moves are very bad, but when it comes to SNOW, I like it, that is, it's not that bad. What are the arguments of those who think SNOW is another bad decision?
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I fu--ing hate SNOW (we actually call it Service Later). At a satellite campus for the 'biggest' university in Canada, the central IT can't respond to tickets properly so you're left wondering WTF is this taking so long. Central IT also had to hire 2 high paying positions and 1 dev position ... and there is nothing to show for it except these single page ticket submission pages. The cost/benefit fails miserably. We have this god forsaken system because, around here, to get the big money, you have to come up with an big idea and force it down everyones throat and call it a success. Then you reap a 6 figure salary while the academic departments hate using Service Later. But due to the toxicity of upper mangement, they are too afraid to speak up. Even the profs are now avoiding Service Later as the don't want to submit tickets to the system. Its a sh-t show.
Service Now, like all "Metrics" idiocy and nonsense which destroy moral and productivity, sucks donkey dongs in He-l. I'm sure it works great in a Chinese slave-labor camp where the masters are trying to get the slave installing 50 screws a minute to hit 60, but in a random-event, impossible-to-script customer service environment, it is far worse than trying to jack-hammer square pegs into round holes. The only thing worse than the 26-year-old brown-nose MBA who dredged this tu-d from the crapp-app septic tank, is the 45-year-old executive who believed the brown-nose.
There is forever-more ONE STANDARD of customer service. ONE.
"Is the client happy with the level of service we provide?"
If the answer is YES, our organization is WORKING and any attempt to "fix it" is doomed to eventual disaster.
Take the brown-nose MBA, the doofuss who promoted him and the executive that green-lighted both the waste of buying this SNOW-storm AND the massive waste of time, money and resources trying to make it do something useful, strip them of
their clothing, slather them with honey and stake them out on an ant hill. Watch your productivity and profit improve.
from the soon to be ex- dispatch side of things... it sucks! We can't reassign calls, we can't close calls for our techs, we can't expedite parts... I currently have over 30 calls that have not synced back to e auto for closing. We have to manually invoice because of the meter issues....
99% of the cores were using e auto and it worked but Xerox decided to shove this pos software down our throats that "empowers" the customer. In other words, will get rid of useless dispatchers.
I have the inside scoop on this. Just like we did with Wings we took the cheaper option and are trying to make a square peg fit into a round ho-e.
Overall I don’t hate the software but I hate the implementation of it. They should have taken an extra month to properly dial the groups in and the training should have used a simulation program instead of watching videos for 2 hours.
Service now sucks. I can see some of us older techs getting done because of how hard of a time we are having figuring this poorly written program out. Not to mention now we are dealing with xerox direct customers who have never seen or heard of us before
Speaking as a field tech, I can say that it's not impossible for young people who know how to figure out clunky software. We Millenials cut our teeth on sh---y open-source software that was often unintuitive and poorly documented. The fact that some people can figure it out doesn't mean the software isn't sh-t.
The vast majority of Xerox techs are either Gen X or Boomers, who didn't spend their childhood years fiddling with computer software. Those guys are having a TERRIBLE time figuring out how to use the app because it's so poorly designed.
I am spending at least two hours daily just walking my older colleagues through the most basic of tasks, such as how to write off parts. Some of them need to be told multiple times, and it's not because they are too d-mb to get it. It's because the UI is so poorly designed.
For example: there are too many different ways that you can look for extra menus. Swipe down, click a link, click the three dots, swipe left... And not all of these give you a visual indicator of when the option is available. So you just have to magically know that a menu might have more items if you swipe down, or that you can swipe left to 'use parts'. That is bad UI design, pure and simple. I have seen software programmed in a high school kid's basement that had better design than this.
And that's not even touching some of the fundamental flaws in how it works. For example, Snow relies heavily on data access. It seems like it's basically a fancy website with a specialized client for viewing. This means Snow does not work if you are not in signal range. This is a huge problem for rural techs. They can't account for their time correctly, but more importantly, they can't always access their queue to contact customers or pull the address for their next call. (Also, I can't imagine the spike in data usage is going to be great for Xerox's bottom line.)
Another example: you can't copy paste out of Snow. This is a huge inconvenience, and adds yet another stumbling block to an already clunky user experience.
I could go on... But you get the point.
It's sad when corporate mo--ns like you try to put a positive spin on a shitshow like SNOW.
@1umg
Sounds like our sales reps to our customers. :D
SNOW is known for giving you the bare bones functionality in the "main" offering, but then charging huge amounts for the "add-ons" that you really need to run your business. Their sales reps never tell the decision makers that. When asked if SNOW can do something, they say yes, but fail to mention that you have to pay extra for it. And I've heard horror stories about customer service and support from them.
But hey, the people that made the decision to purchase it won't care because they'll have already moved on to another position or company by that time.
One the XBS side we used remote tech. Worked good and was simple. SNOW doesn’t flow well and is complicated
They haven't figured out how our shop employees order parts
So many useless features. Its obviously rushed, incomplete, and bound to replace humans. It feels like an app built by college students. Hopefully things change, but boy, you must be crazy to think this app is worth the price
Because it doesn't work. And makes us lose customers.
Some reasons:
- It takes a lot of configuration to make it work. That sounds like checking boxes and clicking buttons. It isn’t.
- After you have spend many thousands on consultants to configure it, you find that you are “missing an add-in” which they will happily sell you.
- After the consultants leave and more modules are purchased, you find it still is not working as promised. At that point you try to solve it in house, only to find that ServiceNow detailed documentation does not exist.
- The people responsible for buying it don’t want to look bad so the company lives with a nonworking product or solves it with an open source ticketing system that can be up in a day.