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Outdated and Overly Complex

Submitted Mar. 4, 2021
Customer Service
2
Does your AMS vendor respond to your organization's requests in a timely and thorough way?
Ease of Use
2
Reliability
4
Customization
3
Version: 
5.111.1
Membership Size: 
5,001-10,000
Industry Type: 
Education
Organization Type: 
Hybrid, Mostly Individual
Primary Job Function: 
Technology
Number of Years Using the AMS: 
1-3 years
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Pros:

  • Some of their Implementation Consultants are rock stars that know the system inside and out and can rapidly diagnose and solve problems.
  • The system is very customizable.
  • The system has an extensive list of features

Cons:

  • Customer Service is slow to respond.
  • Tier 2 support is even slower to fix the issues verified by Customer Service
  • Everything requires multiple clicks to accomplish
  • Many of the features don't actually work well

Takeway:

I stepped into a job in June of 2019 after the association had signed a contract with MemberSuite.  We were migrating from an in-house built system based on MS SQL Server.  The implementation was difficult and a decent amount of data from the old system, while present in the new system, is either not accessible or not maintainable in MemberSuite despite their pride in the system's customizations.  MemberSuite is also built on MS SQL Server and runs on AWS.  The system's main "console" looks extremely outdated which is a little bit disappointing but the only practical impact is that it is completely unusable on mobile devices.  The new Mobile Responsive Portal (or MRP in MemberSuite parlance) which is where your members will see the system is modern looking but does not look current if that makes sense.  It is obviously from the current era but it still doesn't feel up-to-date and fresh.  The biggest issue with the MRP though is that it doesn't actually support all of the features of the "old" portal (which we've only used for the features not supported in the MRP).

The Event Management portion of the system is extremely overly complex to navigate and yet simultaneously lacking in customizability.  Like so many parts of the MemberSuite console it takes 3-4 clicks to make just about any change to an event.  The number of clicks required wouldn't be so frustrating if the pages themselves loaded quickly but that is not the case.  Without making changes to preferences to disable the "360° On-Demand Loading", pages can take 30 seconds or more to load and even with that disabled it still takes several seconds to pull up a members information.

For a product that costs over $30k annually, it is extremely disappointing.