KELL: Services for Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Marketing Cloud

Not reliable, not responsible

Purchased KELLs Receipting application to be installed into our Salesforce instance. They promised to accomplish installation and testing within 3 months. Now 6 months later project still hasn't been completed... :( Really bad experience, due to lack of resources they are not able timely complete projects. Strongly would not recommend to hire them.

We hired Kell Partners to implement Service Cloud with Digital Engagement for our small team to initiate text messages to new members. We had been using them previously for VA/Dev hours and trusted their team with complicated and custom solutions. We were sold on the idea of DE by their sales rep and he passed us to a project manager to build the team. The Sales Rep told us many incorrect things about DE and after the build, we realized this solution is too big for our use case. Throughout the project, there were red flags. There was no historical knowledge passed for our company to this team and even though we had been a customer for 3+ years, we received new client welcome emails. The Project Manager was inefficient in leading meetings. He often would screen share, but during discussions would start using slack or email when he wasn't engaged (which we could see because he was screen sharing). We weren't clear on what exactly his role was other than to schedule and record the meetings. The admin that was on our project was inexperienced, but we felt she also lacked support and oversight from an experienced admin or developer. I found many duplicate, conflicting, and basic design flaws that had to be corrected once we took control of the final product (case assignment rules implemented and a PB that duplicated the effort, fields created and displayed that affected page layouts throughout the org, etc.). Testing and building were done in our production environment, even though we have a UAT environment. After repeated conversations of us asking for the information and process to be more connected and easier to use for our staff, we were told it was not possible and that this is how things worked. There was zero training provided to our team that would be using the product. The project team met with our internal admin and expected us to pass information to the end-user. The documentation we received lacked clarity and correct process steps as outlined and req

It is incredibly important to invest heavily in the scoping process to ensure an accurate scope of work. Make communications and delivery timeline as well as project management expectations clear upfront in order for all parties to be successful. Be explicit with Kell about expectations around the staffing team, including the share of hours that will need a solutions engineer versus a project manager.

Everyone I worked with was very smart and helpful. Administratively, I ran into several issues: hours tracking, staff turnover and poor communication. The work completed was well done and they often took time to make sure I understood what we were doing. As a "learning on the fly" admin, I learned so much from Kell Partners.

I was initially happy with them. 6 months into our contract their company fell apart. Customer service was terrible, non communicative, their salesforce tech had no idea how to do basic salesforce tasks. I repeatedly asked to be transferred, which I wasn't. No one would respond. Eventually I asked to cancel and get a refund and they had the audacity to charge me for a bunch of work that was never completed. As a non profit with limited funds I would NOT recommend them. They should be removed as a partner.

This was our second implementation with KELL Partners and it went even better then the first. We hired KELL to help us add a new layer to our existing Salesforce instance that would allow us to track Resident Programs and Activities throughout 20+ communities. To do this, KELL added in the Non-Profit Program Management and Volunteer modules as well as new third party applications for grids, texting, and uploads. The discovery phase was probably the most difficult part of the project as it meant defining metrics and measurements for data we have never collected before and required a lot of in depth conversations to learn our current processes and determine how to transition those into a digital format. Our project manager from KELL worked closely with our Community Development team for months to create a detailed scope and map of their needs and how we could achieve those needs through Salesforce. At Go Live, they conducted four weeks of extensive training with front-line staff and after Go Live, they have worked with our team to create additional automations and changes that came up through implementation. Overall, working with KELL Partners has been extremely rewarding and beneficial and we plan to continue the relationship with further additions and developments to the program over the next few years.

We hired Kell Partners to assist with our implementation of Salesforce and Pardot. The project manager took time to learn about our organization and workflows. She provided solutions applicable to our work and was always available for questions. As a result, we have a system that meets our needs and will be able to assist in our organization's growth with a new system.

Never Attempted to Meet Our Needs

Kell follows a basic template and probably does amazing work if you fit in that template. We were leaving Pardot to start with Marketing Cloud so we had several specific needs they were not equipped to handle. We also made several specific requests concerning our business units and structures and Kell consistently told us these needs were still in scope only to finally reach the end of implementation for Kell to be shocked we had such needs and reveal they never even attempted to make it work. We even had to bring in our Salesforce rep to confront Kell concerning aspects of the implementation they refused to do (even though it was agreed upon initially) because Kell claimed only Salesforce could do what we needed. In the end we just had to become very fluent in Marketing Cloud ourselves and figure out how to meet our needs in house.

Cannot recommend this consultant

Our previous admin worked with KELL partners to do initial data migration and setup for our NPSP org. There were lots of delays and communication issues during migration, and in the end their project manager quit in the middle of the migration. Two new project managers took over and did okay job migrating the data, but we still ended up with a lot of junk data, including duplicates, unknown records, anonymous records etc which has gone unnoticed for 2 years even though KELL provided VA services and worked on other projects during that time. In retrospect, the whole KELL 360 package was not a great fit for our data model and we ended up cleaning up and deleting most of the customization ourselves with some of the custom code still remaining because KELL is unable to fix it despite putting it there in the first place - my guess is that the developer is no longer with KELL and there is no documentation showing what he/ she has done. When I took over as an admin and tried to get a sense of what work KELL has done for us, their only advice for us was to look at the org and try to figure it out ourselves, again there was no documentation for any of the multiple customization projects they've done for us. Finally, there were instances where their response to our questions was just plain wrong, for example, they did not know how to fix a formula field to omit punctuation marks. I wish we did more vetting when choosing the consultant initially and recommend that everyone who is looking to work with KELL makes sure that they do a thorough discovery first and request that documentation is included with all the projects.

We hired Kell to help us created a complicated journey for pre-event communication. It had a high level of personalization and some pretty specific requirements. They worked with us to figure out the best way to attack the problem, helped create the data extensions needed, and not only created some of the journeys but taught us how to create them, too. It was a great experience and the journey has been running flawlessly since.