We performed a comparison between IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and IT Care Center based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."
"The solution has been stable."
"The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that."
"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."
"A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date."
"In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."
"We have a lot of automation running from our HR system to IT Care Center. When a ticket has been raised to us, we can notify hiring managers on the status of every employee. We also get notifications in Slack for every ticket opened."
"It runs smoothly and all of the components are very easy to work with."
"It provides the ability to view all information relevant to a task. When you open a task, you can see all sub-tasks and the relevant information underneath it. You don't have to search for all the tasks and cases that are relevant to the same issue. The sub-task listing is the most valuable feature of this solution for us. We are also able to create workflows for things such as new hires and purchase requests. We are using it for onboarding new hires in multiple departments, and we are able to create workflows with IT Care Center. We have subsidiaries, and for every subsidiary, we have different rules. It allows us to put the name of the new hire and the computer and software needs for that subsidiary. Around 30% or 40% of our processes are self-service now. We have additional work to do, but we're getting there. I like the flexibility that IT Care Center provides for creating the forms. I can put the fields, values, dropdowns, etc. It makes things much easier, which is another advantage of this solution. When a user opens a ticket, there are certain values that he or she must enter in order for us to solve the ticket faster. For example, a user must enter his or her email. So, I can create a form with all the things that he or she must do, such as provide an email, phone number, etc. These are required fields. A user can't create a ticket without providing that information. So, it saves time and makes the work efficient."
"For a user to open a new ticket, it is very simple. That is an important thing. The system is available for users on the main desktop on their computer, so it is very easy to report tickets. It is very clear. Also, we manage the tickets with rules, according to subject and groups, so they are going to the right person in IT."
"IT Care Center enables us to configure simple forms and flows. It makes our daily customer-facing work very efficient and easy. For example, if we want to add some new flows or change something, we have the ability to do it by ourselves in our own time and manner. This makes it very efficient."
"All of my staff is quite familiar with the usage and we customize based on our daily needs and based on different profiles. As a manager, I require diagnostics on a weekly or monthly basis. diagnostics. There needs to be some reporting for management and for my customers' management as well. So we created our own template. All of our different staff were required to do their own tagging or own tracking of cases. We create our own templates. I create my own template for my own weekly and monthly reporting to management. It's quite flexible in the sense that we're able to add our own customized views. We are able to easily export all this information into a proper reporting structure."
"It also enables us to configure simple forms and flows. The fact that the system is very flexible for adding fields and other forms assists our customer service, as well as myself as the CIO, to easily view my SLAs and KPIs."
"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."
"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."
"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"I would like the solution to have a native application for mobile phones. While I have IT Care Center in my mobile, it is not a pure application, like Outlook or Teams."
"There is no such thing as a perfect solution and in the past, I have contacted support to implement new features."
"Our business is quite interesting because we actually look at our staff based on their productivity. So if a case is created where we want to track the productivity of the user, sometimes we look at how many actual hours they clocked in to solve the case. We realized that it would take quite a lot of hours, which was unusually high. We want to look at how we can measure that against a baseline. For example, every user should resolve the issue within three hours. We want a certain baseline where they have to resolve the issue within certain times and if they don't, I would get alerted."
"They should have full integration with SSO services, like Okta, creating a full service solution."
"There is no global support. With our previous system, we had 24/7 global support. We need much faster support. When I have an issue and raise a ticket, someone should call me back. They can also think about having object-oriented APEX so that the agents can easily create dashboards instead of having to learn the complete APEX language. This is something very important for us. We are using Oracle APEX for creating certain dashboards with KPIs. This is the visual platform that we use to see all the data, and it is very important for us because we get all the BI and data. Currently, we have a vendor who helps us with that because we don't know how to use it ourselves. We want to use it to make more dashboards with more KPIs for every department, but we cannot because we don't have the knowledge. We are very dependent on the vendor and the time he has for us."
"IT Care Center has some room for improvement in regard to mobile. It doesn't have an application, there is only an adaptable web page, and that is less convenient."
"The UI screens could be a little bit more modern."
Earn 20 points
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews while IT Care Center is ranked 36th in Help Desk Software. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6, while IT Care Center is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IT Care Center writes "Easy to use, helping us reduce costs by half". IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management, whereas IT Care Center is most compared with .
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