Personify Review

As a user of Personify version 7.4.1 and primary contact for internal staff at my organization we have had challenges working with Personify. Below is a summary of our experience: END-USERS A big plus is that documentation for end-users has improved over the past year. There is still a deficit in that the documents uses terminology and acronyms that are not adequately defined and lead to road-blocks. There have been more times since these improvements have been made that I was able to avoid having to submit a ticket and work through Customer Service. Customer Service has generally been poor unless you are lucky enough to have a more technical CS rep assigned to your account. However, those reps don't stay in those positions long. Responses to submitted tickets are often not complete and require more time than should be necessary to work through to resolution. The reps assigned to us over the past few years have largely been unable to answer simple questions and tend to escalate everything to a more technical resource. Features have been added as the AMS has gone through updates and upgrades. The interface feels very old-school and clunky. It could use a major facelift. There is also a large learning curve to train new staff and keep existing staff on the right path with continual refresher training. While the volume and types of data that could be captured is significant, the usability of the AMS is lacking and requires users to hunt to find the appropriate areas to enter information. We've limited customizations as much as possible to avoid inflated costs to transition the customizations during upgrades. The cost to upgrade is very expensive when you go through Personify Corp directly so I'm hearing of more customers using third party shops when upgrading. TECHNICAL STAFF My IT team has had constant struggles with using web services when integrating with our websites. Many just don't work as described and the documentation is not helpful. We've had to build custom solutions which is discouraging and costly. We do a lot of integration with our websites so this is particularly painful. There are technical staff at Personify that care and do a good job. On the Professional Services side (Pay to Play), the work orders are estimated accurately most of the time which is a great plus. Staff require a large amount of support from the IT team to use the system and troubleshoot issues. OVERALL Personify tends to be modeled more for professional societies although they do have a number of trade associations as well as clients. Modules and improvements that have been made are overshadowed by a user interface that has not matured with the rest of the system. We often find that features shown in demos do not work well in real-world situations.