Onboarding and Support at Planhat is out of this world. Their professional services team is phenomenal and the best in the business. They are trained in change management which for us, was something we desperately needed. Our project manager walked us through the process, helped us create a project plan, identify critical milestones, and provided us with the necessary tools and resources to successfully implement Planhat. We felt supported all the way through and even implemented some of the practices we learned in our own team. Our TAM was equally amazing in helping us understand what to do or what we would need from a technical perspective, brainstormed with us solutions for some challenging problems, and provided guidance or feedback if our solutions could potentially cause issues long term. The support team is fantastic and reliable. They respond promptly, are quick to resolve your issue if they can and have the resources to do and will escalate it to the proper channels if needed. They also make sure to keep you updated so you're not left in the dark on your issue.
The UI/UX is very clean and slick. Although we have a lot of data in the platform, users are not immediately overwhelmed by all of it. The ability to customize views for users has had a huge impact on how our teams operate. We've been able to create technical views that cater more towards our TAM team and how they operate which has allowed us to surface risk related to the product (license issues, tenant issues, etc.). This has allowed us to surface risk sooner and improved collaboration across our product and engineering teams. This has also resulted in broader interest in Planhat across the business, more teams are not only wanting access to the tool, but they're also wanting to know how they can incorporate it into their tools and processes.
Flexible automations have also drastically improved our day-to-day operating rhythm. The ability to use branches, include AI or a function has allowed us to implement complex automations for data issues we struggled to address. An example is account level product segmentation. This used to be a manual effort by our CS Ops team which resulted in missed or outdated data. We also weren't able to account for various nuances. With automations (and the help of the product catalog), we were able to implement a solution that not only updated the account level product segment, but also created a text list of current products without including child-level products, tagged our accounts with specific values, updated key data on the asset level, and captured duplicate external Ids (to avoid erroring out). We also leveraged automations and AI to generate a slide deck for our escalation process. This resulted in about an 87% reduction in time spent on manual/admin work for our CSMs and created consistency in the process that we didn't have before.
Planhat has a robust catalog of platforms they integrate with which has been a huge win for us. And they're consistently expanding it! For the most part, integrations are very easy to set up and manage. Any challenges typically come from internal processes or blockers. They also provide great documentation on each integration, how to set them up, the requirements needed, and how to troubleshoot if you run into issues. We've connected to Salesforce, Pendo, Hubspot, BigQuery, Jira, Gong, and Outlook. For us, BigQuery is unique because we used an API connection instead of the out-of-the-box integration. However, it was very easy for our business partner to set it up with the documentation. Gong is currently set up via an API and is primarily done by your TAM. This is another that is also pretty easy to setup on both sides. Once it's activated, there is quite a bit you can do with it which I was surprised by. We have been able to sync over the AI generated meeting summary, metrics, and transcript all of which the team has found a lot of value in.
I've noticed an improvement in the overall performance of Planhat. Our number of accounts has grown, so the load on the system is significantly higher, especially with the number of automations and AI we're running. Planhat handles it well! We have not experienced errors, page freezes, or crashes. On initial login, there is a little bit of a delay, but it's not enough to negatively impact users or their ability to use the tool. Another thing worth mentioning is their dashboards and presentation templates. Our team tends to like to put a lot of tables and charts in their dashboards and presentations. I would anticipate this causing some performance issues, but that has not been the case. Despite our dashboards/presentations having a lot of data and content, they perform very well. Users are able to scroll through without having to wait for data to load. They can also click on charts and widgets and have the corresponding report popup without issue. For presentations, there is sometimes that initial lag when you first open it, but again, it's nothing that negatively impacts users or the ability to use the tool.
All in all, we are definitely getting our money's worth with Planhat. The tool is powerful and there is so much more left to do with it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Planhat has a lot of out-of-the box fields which are great. However, most of them can't be edited to fit your business or use case. An example would be the customer status field on the account. It is primarily driven by the revenue module. However, depending on how your business decides to manage/recognize revenue and active vs inactive customers, this may not work. It would be nice to be able to edit the values and sync this to the primary status field we use in Salesforce, so data aligns across both systems. There is always the option to create a custom field which is what we have done, but we would prefer to utilize what's available first, then create custom fields for what doesn't exist.
The lack of customization in the revenue module is a pain point for us. I think they have made some great improvements with this recently that should definitely get some recognition. One thing that's still lacking is the ability to customize or edit the system reports and how ARR is calculated in general. Renewal Rate reports don't allow you to change the columns that are visible, so the owner column isn't helpful because we don't use that field. It also doesn't let you choose the structure of the report. Our team would rather see Account, Deal, then line item rather than just Account and Line item. When it comes to how the reports calculate, you now have the option to choose your own custom date and ARR fields and if you want to include closed, won, or both deals. However, if you want to include both closed and open deals, you can choose to use ARR fields from either the Deal or Line-Item object for Open deals, and only ARR fields from the Line-Item object for closed Won. Since we don't operate based on line-items, this creates calculation issues for us, so we have to adjust how we choose to forecast. The system reports are great and extremely helpful, but we do have to create some workarounds to account for some of these challenges.
Lastly, combining Notes with the Task and Conversation objects is a surprising pain point for users. To clarify, this does not mean they can't use the tool or that it directly impacts how they work. It's more of an intuitive approach to how they interact with the tool. A common piece of feedback I get back is "can we separate notes from everything else?". Users want a dedicated object for notetaking, so they know where to go to find or log their notes. It is something we have tried to remedy in our own way by creating a custom page or table that shows notes, but users seem to want more than that. With the great AI and document features Planhat has, a separate object for notes could be very powerful and extremely beneficial to users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
