Insights and musings about customer service and managing a SaaS software company.
Archive for the ‘SaaS’ Category
March 10, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
Today I am speaking at the Mobile10 event at Olympia in London about efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Some people would think this is a strange combination… efficiency AND customer service/satisfaction? Most people actually think that these two actually negate each other!
But for TOA this is our bread and butter! Literally! We make our living not just combining the two – but making them work in harmony to both reduce operating costs and enhance the customer experience.
This is because our basic premise is that these two issues are equally and completely intertwined. You cannot have one without the other:
And in TOA’s world it’s focus on the customer experience and making sure that customer commitment is MET and that the customer not only has what he or she needs -but has it when and where you promised to deliver it. This is the only TRUE PATH TO EFFICIENCY.
When we started this TOA our goal was to solve the problem of customers “waiting at home without knowing” when a technician (engineer in UK-speak) would arrive at their door.
That was the original seed of the idea: Why not solve the problem of customers “waiting without knowing” by providing them with real-time up-to-date information about the status of their appointment in a pro-active, personalized, dynamic and interactive way?! Such a simple idea!
But what we found was that underlying that lack of information to the customer – was a lack of accurate information by ALL the stakeholders in the appointment event: dispatchers, managers, technicians/mobile employees, call center customer service reps, etc. No one had an actual, up-to-date, easily accessible, real-time picture of the field.
And that’s what we created with TOA’s web-based SaaS solution: A system that collects analyzes , processes and disseminates real-time, time-based, actionable, predictive, intelligent information of what is happening in the field with a focus on the customer and the customer experience.
This is the first true web-based information hub to aggregate all the relevant information about the appointment or field event So that no one is left out in the dark wondering: What is actually going on? When is that appointment or activity going to happen? Why do I have to wait all day without knowing?
We ended up creating one probably the most sophisticated system focusing on predictive analytics, on time and time-based performance pattern recognition and integrated customer communications. All with the goal of keeping customer commitment! That’s the key!
February 22, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
Great post on Evangelos Simoudis’ Blog with a summary of an interesting panel discussion they had at Trident Capital about SaaS Sales.
October 27, 2009 by Yuval Brisker
Last week, TOA Technologies and PivotLink announced a ground-breaking partnership to upgrade the Business Intelligence tools available to service providers who choose TOA for mobility solutions.
This is an exciting announcement for TOA because it represents full integration with another innovative SaaS vendor that takes our capabilities to a new high.
I am writing about this not just because I am proud of what we are doing with PivotLink and the value it brings to customers (which I am). I am highlighting this because this is further proof of how the power of the platform (the Internet platform, that is) manifests even more when you start “mashing up” great applications – enterprise grade applications like our and PivotLink’s – to bring to market the combined strength of both, in this case an advanced BI tool in ETAdirect, TOA’s mobile workforce management SaaS application. The reality is that TOA would never want to develop this capability on our own and now we have it, and from our customer’s POV, it’s completely seamless and transparent. It’s part of the TOA app. Without them having to buy separate apps, deal with the different vendors and integration, etc. They just have it at their disposal all the gain, no pain.
Great news and more power to SaaS!
You can read the full release here: http://toatech.com/news/Press_Releases.html?top=24
October 23, 2009 by Irad Carmi
Here’s a post from our first guest blogger, my partner, co-founder and friend, TOA’s CTO – Irad Carmi:
I read a NY Times article last week about the value of the subscription model, which led me to the following thoughts:
Almost every item we acquire has an end-of-life built into it. It may be a camera, a laptop, a shirt, a car. Buyers and sellers know that the product will expire/break and will have to be replaced at full price. Software is especially prone to this built-in obsolescence. You can either upgrade it for a lot of money, or one day you won’t be able to use it. Even if you upgrade the software you can reach a point where you can no longer use it. Many software companies have been upgrading their products for decades, even though the hardware it runs on is no longer even being manufactured.
Imagine how nice it would be to have a subscription for a laptop or a car. Every month you get a brand new model. It never breaks, never gets outdated, and constantly improves.
As you figured out by now, that’s exactly what TOA and other SaaS vendors offer. And prior to this wave this was an unheard of approach in the enterprise software world. A continuously self-renewing solution, one which always runs on the latest hardware, using the latest technology, and gets better every day. The value of this ongoing incremental improvement is huge, and includes not only the price of upgrades and new hardware, but also savings on IT and training personnel, painless Change Management, and significant competitive advantage.
Gartner says that in two short years, by 2012, 30% of all customer service and support applications will be delivered on-demand. SaaS has proven itself as a discontinuous innovation. It’s been transforming the world of software for nearly a decade. And those companies who don’t recognize it risk becoming one of the “Have-Nots.”
