Ombud Reviews

Pros

Our users find the software easy to navigate, and the content management features are excellent. We can't imagine developing proposals without it now.

Cons

The system-wide reporting dashboards leave a lot to be desired, but the library does offer some decent querying functionality.

Alternatives Considered

Loopio

Reasons for Choosing Ombud

We never had a successful Qvidian implementation, and the product features were outdated and not user-friendly.

Switched From

Qvidian

Reasons for Switching to Ombud

Ombud's features and customer service far outstripped the other vendors we considered at the time.

Pros

Workflow and the ability to spread assignments and work load. Reuse of existing content with the ability to easily nominate and approve new content. Licensing model fit our business that requires multiple subject matter experts across a broad product portfolio.

Cons

Ability to report on how much time in each stage in a summary report. My understanding this is road mapped.

Alternatives Considered

Loopio

Reasons for Switching to Ombud

Licensing model was flexible and fit better. Biggest difference I felt was the level of engagement during my elongated sales cycle. I spent over a year+ investigating and then justifying the business case internally. From the CEO down I felt they had 100% focus on customer experience. This has proven out even after we purchased and deployed.

Pros

Ombud is easy to use and pretty intuitive.

Cons

Importing/Exporting data, graphics needs to be upgraded, become more flexible to accomodate apples to apples transitions.

Pros

The simplicity combined with the range of features, particularly collaboration.

Cons

I have no dislikes specific to the software.

Alternatives Considered

Upland PSA and Loopio

Reasons for Choosing Ombud

Ombud had a superior platform and technology roadmap.

Switched From

RocketDocs

Reasons for Switching to Ombud

Ombud delivered all the features we hoped to gain, and we felt the Ombud team was the best cultural fit to our organization.

Pros

The ability to support parallel resource collaboration while maintaining versioning is critical and has been (for me) the #1 feature. Assignment feature and messaging directly from a question are very helpful. Filtering questions by various criteria for ease of responding, review, and other criteria.

Cons

Working in filter mode can be difficult occasionally. For example, if I'm working on Unanswered questions, and want/need to stop for some reason, Saving the question removes it from the filtered space immediately. Clearing the filter does not always bring me directly back to the question. Long RFPs can be difficult, as the screen can only show so much. I tend to scroll a lot. Not major issues, but inconvenient at times depending on SLAs. Also would like to see a way to eliminate older RFPs from the search algorithm. I understand the design premise to be that utilizing updated master content on a consistent basis will push older responses down in the response returns, but this does not work well in real life. Maintaining master content and currency is difficult in our particular environment, but I'm sure this is not a rare problem across your customer base. And people tend not to read closely every response option that is returned, especially when they are similar at a glance. That's just the way it is, and again I assume it is not unheard of across customers and industries.

Pros

The ability to centralize our content for reuse and streamline collaboration has been a gamechanger. Between the time saving, improved responses, and higher win rates, RFP responses are no longer met with cringes internally.

Cons

The chat/comment functionality could be more robust. It's not intuitive which is disappointing in a platform that is so easy to use. My team has found appropriate workarounds but just something to note for teams that are less familiar with the platform.

Alternatives Considered

Loopio, Qvidian and Responsive (formerly RFPIO)

Pros

It is simple, effective and very good at what it does. Time taken to respond to RFP's has been reduced by over 50% for every stakeholder, and there is a soft saving in our ability to surface approved content so our messaging is always up to date. The crowd-sourcing aspect of content management is excellent. We're looking forward to generating pro-active tailored proposals to take advantage of the different ways of working that Ombud gives up.

Cons

For our needs, there's nothing that inhibits our productivity so there are no omissions that would be worth calling out here. For example, there are 4 user profiles - some might feel this is limiting but I this simplicity helps me to clearly understand the scope of each profile and design our access policy quickly then move on to things that really matter. Other needs / wants have been surfaced because Ombud allows us to operate in new ways, so new thinking creates new feature requests. But Ombud is great at what it does.

Pros

Choosing and staying with Ombud is a no-brainer.

My first favorite thing is how much time it saves the sales and pre-sales team when we are responding to proposals. The AI helps us find the best answers to the questions, saving us about 40% of proposal response time, while also making sure our answers are updated, accurate, and persuasive.

My second favorite thing is that the interface is also intuitive and modern, especially compared to their competitors.

And what really makes Ombud an even greater winner for me is their customer support team. They are the absolute most helpful support team I have ever worked with. They are timely in their response, and they won't hesitate to jump on a call with me to walk me through an issue (usually a user error issue, not an Ombud issue!). They also provide me with a wealth of ideas on how to use Ombud in new and innovative ways.

Cons

My only con is that they don't have a global team, yet. This doesn't hurt their customer support, but it means they aren't as well known in Europe as some of the other, less innovative proposal software vendors.

Pros

The Show Suggestions feature and subsequent search bar that appears feels like magic compared to the way we used to respond to RFPs. If you build your Reference content with good key words and give the machine learning a little bit of time, the questions practically answer themselves.

Beyond that, the Search bar and Filter tools are helpful for users who are not as familiar with Reference content, as well as for questions that are more specific and warrant a search of past RFPs. One co-worker described it as an internal Google, which I have to agree with!

Cons

There are occasionally minor bugs that appear when working with the interface (behaviors that you don't expect to happen when you perform an action), but it seems like Ombud is aware of this and making improvements with each new release. Their Support team is also incredibly responsive.

Pros

My team works on a high volume of complex RFPs. The most appealing, and most widely complimented, feature of Ombud is the collaboration it provides during proposal development as well as proposal library curation. The system allows multiple users to work simultaneously to develop strategic proposal responses as well as provides visibility and auditability of responses. The tool works well with various RFP formats as well.

Cons

There are some areas of improvement relative to searchability and reporting, although nothing that hinders our ability to complete proposals efficiently and timely.

Pros

When I was new to the team, Ombud allowed me to retain the information and help answer the Security Questionnaires and RFPs. Not only was it a tool to respond to customer questionnaires and RFPs, it was like a study guide to learn about the company products. It became my go-to knowledge base. The Ombud team always has a quick turnaround when uploading the documents and questions.

Cons

Honestly, it is hard to find a dislike or something that is least helpful with Ombud.
If I had to pick one thing, it would be the conditional responses on portals. There are times when there are so many conditional responses, Ombud is unable to pick them up and upload it.

Pros

The possibility to have the work well organized and to track the changes done by other users

Cons

There are some customizations that I have to do once the file is exported (not possible to make those changes in Ombud)

Pros

Ombud is very easy to use, rich in functionality, and allows our teams to collaborate cross-functionally. It has allowed us to respond to RFPs more quickly and efficiently. The Ombud team is always extremely responsive to questions we've had and to requests for new functionality. Switching to Ombud was one of the best decisions our company ever made!

Cons

Bulk Suggester and Search functionality could be better although I've heard there are significant improvements in the latest release.

Pros

The ability to pick previous answers reduces time to respond and quality of response significantly

Cons

There's not much that is difficult to use! Pretty straightforward.

Pros

Ease of finding answers from other RFx's and other docs.

Cons

The editing interface and ability to preview how it will look in output document

Pros

Much easier to use and collaborate on RFPs also their success team is super responsive and helpful.

Cons

I do not have any cons. I did not know how much I liked Ombud until we switched to RFP360.