Insights and musings about customer service and managing a SaaS software company.
Archive for the ‘SaaS’ Category
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 It never breaks, never gets outdated, and constantly improves.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.”
October 22, 2009 by Yuval Brisker
They say you can’t go wrong buying IBM … that this is the common manager’s solution to a buying conundrum where a well known, more traditional technology or provider is pitted against a more innovative technology or a newcomer . But if you look at the evidence over time, it’s actually just as risky, maybe even riskier to NOT take the road less traveled and go for the new.
One of the common myths about SaaS is that because you pay an ongoing usage fee for as long as you use the software service, you actually end up paying more over time than traditional on-premise license based legacy software. Well, we at TOA, of course, have refuted that common ‘wisdom’ with all our customers, who ultimately ended up opting to go with us, to go SaaS. But for many, that misguided notion still exists. And we can prove that it is in fact misguided. The long term benefits of SaaS are easily calculated, if you use a REAL calculator not tinted by those long biases.
A new survey by Forrester Research validates what we in the SaaS world have long known, namely, that Software-as-a-Service Can Save You Money — Even in the Long Term.
The Forrester Research basically says that SaaS pricing models may offer potential for better long-term return on investment (ROI) than on-premises solutions.
That…may come as a shock to some!
The report — based on surveys with SaaS-solution vendors and users, past inquiries, and case studies with clients of Hewlett-Packard, Salesforce.com, and Workday (a provider of on-demand human resources software) — identifies long-term benefit in three aspects of a SaaS initiative:
- rapid deployment of applications, freeing enterprises from the need to buy hardware;
- access to pre-configured or easily configured solutions that firms can turn on in days or weeks with minimal configuration; and
- better user-adoption rates thanks to familiarity with the Web
Forrester also says that SaaS helps reducing the dependency on information technology and administrative personnel and support — responsibilities that might otherwise have meant hiring more people or even outsourcing to external service providers.
Instead, SaaS providers often handle bug fixes and patches seamlessly.
I hate to be cynical about this – but for those who are not ‘onto’ SaaS yet…all this may come as a revelation… for those of us who are living and breathing this business 24/7 it’s just our life: We are Service Providers. And a Good Service Provider delivers a Good Service. For us that means all the above plus more. And the world is not just catching on…it’s there.
August 11, 2009 by Yuval Brisker
“As products commoditize, the world becomes flatter, prices go down, what’s left? Well, it’s how we take care of our customers. Companies are wrestling with how do they match constrained budgets with this need to increase customer satisfaction.
“We’re finding that consumers want choice in how they contact a company. All the avenues have to be open, whether it’s chat or e-mail or phone. In fact, consumers are differentiating less. They might start an interaction via e-mail and then escalate to a phone. So companies need systems in place”
– Greg Gianforte of RightNow Technologies
The idea of a flatter world means that customer service differentiation strategy and execution is going places never before seen by a CRM system … (This is good news for the consumer).
And, at the end of the day, like mobile computing and communications, there is a sense of impending ubiquity in the world of enhanced customer service powered by on-demand software. Let’s face it — now that we have SaaS that can provide companies of any size with a solution for enhanced customer service – what makes the big guys stand out from the small guys? And vice-versa? Customer Focus and Choice.
Customers expect and should get both.
