The AMS landscape is evolving rapidly. With the ever-changing nature of technology, older comments can sometimes provide a skewed view to the person seeking feedback. Archived reviews are more than 60 months old, and aren't counted towards the average five star ratings or percent recommended.

Netforum is fine when it works, but their support and QA leave a lot to be desired.

Customer Service
1
Does your AMS vendor respond to your organization's requests in a timely and thorough way?
Ease of Use
4
Reliability
2
Customization
3
Primary Job Function: 
Operations, Administration

I work for a small association and we have been using Avectra Netforum for five years. It is our first AMS and at the outset it seemed to be a good choice. We were looking for a solution that would require as little customization as possible. Netforum had the functionality we were looking for and we were able to get up and running very quickly. Our experience has been that when the application is working as it should, it is, for the most part, a good solution. However, Netforum does not always work as it should, and it has been costly for us in time and energy. When it does not work as it should, either because an existing functionality fails after a new build is installed, or an existing functionality behaves in ways that what we, as customers, feel to be counterintuitive (ie, data in committee tables not reflecting current data in main CRM table; poor labeling on reports; import tools creating data problems), we end up using workarounds for long periods of time. Netforum suffers from a troubled R&D/ implementation process, an apparently overextended support team, and an ever-changing, often baffling, support ticketing system. Small issues are addressed slowly or not at all, larger issues are addressed with more urgency but often not enough, and not well enough. Each new build (2-4 per year) brings new bugs so that after a new build is released we invariably have to change some aspect of our workflow until lost functionality is restored. Even when the problems are very serious, as when the most recent build unexpectedly created credits for users' customers that they were then able to use to make purchases, the response is in the order of days and weeks, not hours and days. Avectra was recently bought by Abila and it remains to be seen how this will change the overall experience. So far, it's improved but not as much as we would like to see. In the past, I often felt that their support had an almost adversarial relationship with its customers, defensive and quick to shift responsibility from themselves to the customer. Since Abila took over, support seems to be a little more responsive in communicating, but a lot of issues, large and small, are still hanging, unresolved. I hope that the new management understands the importance of customer satisfaction and that ultimately it is the resolution of the issue that is most important. When nothing is broken the customer may not be able to tell that there is anything wrong. But when serious problems occur, support needs to be more than friendly and available, they need to actually fix the problem, and quickly. I recognize that an off the shelf product cannot be all things to all people, and that accommodation and workarounds are always going to be necessary. However, I spend a lot of my time dealing with Netforum issues, either chasing their support team, doing independent research on the issues, making sure that our staff is all on the same page with the new workarounds, manually making changes to records that cannot be changed in any other way, or troubleshooting issues. Bottom line: Netforum should be easy to use and promises a lot of sensible functionality. In practice, the application can be frustrating. Functionality sometimes improves, and sometimes deteriorates because of new bugs. Avectra/ Abila needs a better R&D QA process, and they need to show their customers that they respect them by recognizing the ways in which their mistakes have cost us time and money. They need to convince us that they actually want to keep us as customers (I honestly don't know if they do), and they can do this by solving problems, not introducing new ones, and taking responsibility for the ones that have cost us. I would recommend Netforum only to someone who is very patient, has someone on staff who has time to deal with the application and Avectra, and is optimistic about their customer relations philosophy.