Insights and musings about customer service and managing a SaaS software company.
Archive for the ‘TOA Customers’ Category
May 12, 2011 by Yuval Brisker
Today, TOA announced that it raised $17.2M in a Series D lead by Sutter Hill Ventures with the participation of Tim Draper, Fort Washington and existing shareholders Intel Capital, Draper Triangle Ventures and private investors.
It’s an exciting moment for us - as we look at the rapidly evolving technology market and see only opportunity at every level and I want to talk a little bit about that.
First and foremost this is about extending TOA’s leadership in cloud-based on-demand enterprise Software-as-a-Service – or what we call “eSaaS“.
Secondly – it’s about maximizing the potential of mobile internet and mobility applications.
And third – it’s about taking advantage of the opportunity of the awakening global market for mobility applications for mobile employees – a previously sleepy market that has been undervalued and underinvested in to date.
1) eSaaS – TOA has near perfected the art of enterprise SaaS. Enterprise SaaS is NOT just about a web-based solution or producing software that’s accessible via a browser – Enterprise SaaS or eSaaS (as I like to call it) – is about something completely different. It’s about:
- integration – and the availability of the sophisticated tools to allow for the complex interweaving of SaaS with legacy software systems with ease. Emphasis on sophisticated and ease! Without these – there is no chance for a SaaS solution to be viable for the large enterprise.
- flexibility – the ability to provide a solution that has the kind of malleability to literally morph with the clients’ business and respond to the ever changing business and technological environments that is the reality for most enterprises – definitely OUR clients and their businesses.
- reliability – as we witnessed a few weeks ago with amazon web service big event – providing a system that is 100% there for the enterprise is NOT easy and doing so is a huge responsibility and needs a high degree of expertise. This is not easy to come by or easy to deliver. Don’t let anyone fool you. TOA does it with expertise.
- scalability – the ability to support huge distributed businesses with high volumes, and to continue to support their growth into the long term
In 2004 – when we launched TOA and the first version of ETAdirect, we took enormous inspiration and even guidance from Marc Benioff – we bet our future on many of the ideas he espoused and beyond. We knew that it would be risky to go after the big enterprises with SaaS and that many IT departments would look at us and think that we were out of our minds to try and provide a system for them from outside their firewall. But the tide of technology is relentless and things have definitely moved in our direction. SaaS is here to stay and more – 10 years from now – it’s going to power the majority of businesses – not only small but medium, large and extra large. We made the right decision at the absolute right time back then to bet on SaaS. Betting on eSaaS as the next frontier was betting beyond SaaS for the SMBs – and it has given us the experience, the expertise and the track record a software company MUST have in order to successfully sell to large enterprise IT. We are excited about the many amazing new things that we are doing and will be unvaling in the coming months and years.
eSaaS is different from regular SaaS in very many ways and as software is delivered more and more via the SaaS model – the needs for eSaaS solution to replace the old legacy enterprise software solutions that run businesses today and in the past – will only grow and become dominant and only way – and TOA is well positioned to expand to meet the challenge and the opportunity.
2) This is about mobility and the Mobile Internet – maybe if you were living in a cave in Tora Bora (which obviously you weren’t) you might not be aware of the real revolution that is happening in people’s lives. Everyone is connected in multiple ways via multiple devices and many channels. The smart-phone and the tablet is in its infancy as a business device and TOA is well positioned via its early adoption of the smart-phone / iPad as THE platform of choice and a completely browser-based application to take advantage of many new developments that are here and coming soon. Mobility is king and device and platform agnostic apps will lead the way to the many platforms we intend to make the most of our early leadership providing eSaaS via the mobile Internet to millions of users worldwide who do work in the field. Those users are the same users who have iPhones and Androids and use them addictively in their personal lives. They expect nothing less from software when they go to work – and yet in many (or most) cases they are still using antiquated systems on antiquated platforms on antiquated devices. Opportunity abounds.
3) Lastly, this is about the needs of the global market of mobile employees – the mobile workforce management software market has been around for a long time but has been, to date, underserved and undervalued – the convergence of many of the trends that I described above provides a real inflection point for a market that has seen little change in the past decade. TOA’s solution has a patented predictive technology and an approach and completeness that provides relevant and transformative value to the many satisfied customers and users it serves. We want to bring that to every enterprise that has people working in the field. They all deserve the best. The market of mobile employees is huge and they deserve TOA and we intend to bring it to every corner of the globe.
Thanks to Andy Sheehan from Sutter Hill Ventures who showed immediate and unflagging enthusiasm for us and our vision- I know he sees what we see. Thanks also to Tim Draper for his great intuition and continued inspiration. A big and special thanks to our long term supporters at Draper Triangle Ventures, Early Stage Partners and Intel Capital, as well as the private investors and friends who saw the vision from day one and have stuck with us from the start. Lastly – I want to thank our immensely dedicated employees and our great customers – this just validates what they already know.
As Jeff Bezos says: It’s Always Day One!
Stay Tuned!
September 20, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
“Besides perhaps a root canal or a tax audit, few things can be more frustrating than making an appointment to have a cable technician visit your home. You’re given a four-hour window and find yourself waiting and waiting, with no idea when the technician will arrive. Inevitably, it seems, he does not show up until just before the window expires. Or, despite the four-hour time frame, he arrives late.”
- “Cable Contract Has Fines for Late Service”, Fernanda Santos, New York Times, September 14th, 2010
In honor of TOA’s 7th birthday last week – The New York Times reported eloquently that the City of New York (the place where the idea for TOA was actually born) gave its citizens a long needed present by officially recognizing “The Cable Guy Problem” and codifying into law that cable companies have to provide a Time of Arrival (TOA) and then need to arrive on time or face a serious penalty (losing a month’s subscriber fees).
As all those who read this blog know – TOA Technologies, my company, has made it its mission to solve this problem : i.e. the problem of customers stranded at home, frustrated, waiting without knowing when, or even if, the cable technician will arrive. TOA’s advanced technology solution helps our clients manage customer appointments and the technicians in the field serving those customers with one goal in mind – to make sure that customers’ time is respected and customers’ needs and preferences come first. Our patented solution has been adopted by many companies around the country and the world to specifically address the problem (including some in the NY Tri-State area).
Irad Carmi (my partner) and I recognized years ago that this problem was not ‘just another customer service annoyance’ but rather a greater sociological, economic issue that reflects a deep systemic operational problem that most service providers who run a mobile workforce have ignored. It is ingrained in their legacy systems and processes and based on just plain taking the customer and their time for granted. But it ultimately ends up backfiring and producing a lot of inefficiency along the way.
This problem isn’t trivial because it ends up costing many millions of people, the customers waiting at home, a lot of their precious time, their hard earned money, vacation time, their freedom, etc. It produces aggravation, at the least and, many times, even animosity towards these service providers and their employees. It also actually costs these companies their brand equity, the goodwill of their customers and a lot of wasted revenue money lost on missed appointments, unproductive technician time, unnecessary calls to the call center and, most of all, the ultimate price: customers leaving them when better service is offered by someone else.
[In fact, TOA just completed its annual Cost of Waiting Survey, which we will publish shortly and which I will be blogging about. This survey examines this very issue and its economic and social effects in three countries (US, UK and Germany), and the results are incredibly interesting, so stay tuned].
TOA has been blessed by many visionary clients who ‘got it’. They are the trailblazers, the early adopters, who gave us a chance at every point along the way, and who like us, just could not sit around and see their companies waste tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of dollars AND not provide great service to their customers.
There are always visionaries in every company. But all it takes is one person. One person, I know, can change a culture, a company, the world entire. And we have met many of these. These visionary leaders know that they had to make a change and they were and are willing to fight for that change themselves, against the machinations of their organizations. They do this because they know that they are right. They know that there is a better way – and using a cross section of technology and mind to transform the customer appointment experience (using TOA, of course) – and they KNOW: if it is there, then they have to make a better experience available to their customers. It takes a lot to make change in big companies, but there are always people who do.
We are grateful to them (and you know who you are…) for standing up to the status quo and for giving us a great opportunity to (in our small way) help make life better for your customers in many places around the country and the world. So it is to these leaders that I am dedicating this post, and about them that I am actually writing the response to the NY Times article AND today’s editorial about this issues (yes, the Times wrote an editorial about this). Because these clients of ours did not need legislation to choose positive change for their companies and their customers.
We have a lot more companies and many more leaders to convince that we have THE solution for them. But with the help of my great team and the help of our fantastic set of current bold visionary clients (who all become evangelists too…) I know that we will.
Oh, and thank you, City of New York!
September 12, 2010 by Irad Carmi
My co-founder, partner and our CTO, Irad Carmi, has written a great post regarding the power of technology to enable a more complete, humane and trusting relationship between our customers and their employees – and at the same time – increase efficiencies and the bottom line. Yes… in TOA’s world – humanity and the bottom line can co-exist. Here’s Irad:
One of the interesting changes that happens to our customers once TOA’s system is deployed is the significant evolution in the way they perceive the work ethic of their mobile employees and the impact of that evolution.
Before using TOA and without real time visibility into what’s happening in the field (which most companies don’t have before they use TOA – YB), companies assume their mobile employees are “guilty until proven innocent”. In other words – companies assume that many mobile employees are trying to somehow deceive them: taking longer than reported or needed breaks, finishing jobs early and taking their time to report on that, starting the day later and finishing the day earlier than they actually report, etc..
Because of this sense of management’s ‘not knowing what is really happening out there’, companies have too many supervisors and spend significant resources in an effort to try to find out, retroactively, if their mobile employees were actually “not guilty”. This inverse approach is expensive, inefficient, ineffective, and along the way, doesn’t contribute to good employer-employee relationships.
TOA introduces a paradigm shift:
By providing complete transparency through real-time visibility into all field activities at multiple tiers of the company’s management (dispatchers, supervisors, managers – all have real time visibility into field operations status via advanced web-based tools), companies can significantly simplify their operational processes, save a lot of money, and improve efficiencies. And mobile employees are considered “innocent” by default.
With TOA’s solution, ETAdirect, it is extremely hard to “cheat” time, and a supervisor can respond to any perceived abnormalities within minutes. Approval processes are simplified and streamlined, and everyone wins.
What does this mean in practical terms?
A pre-ETAdirect customer may have a manual triple-approval process before a work order is closed and submitted to the billing and customer care system. With ETAdirect the process is reduced to a single automated step – from the mobile device directly to the back-end billing and customer care system. Any errors/omissions are caught by ETAdirect’s front end, back end, or the billing system seamlessly. An error triggers instant escalation, and the supervisor can ensure it is quickly addressed. As a results, instead of having three supervisors check every single work orders, only one supervisor needs to pay attention to 3 out of every 100 work orders.
How does this impact the customers who use our system and this approach?
1. TOA’s customers see significant reduction in number of dispatchers/supervisors needed to actually manage field operations. And those who are managing the field are not doing mindless oversight and auditing of daily work (which helps their morale too).
2. Mobile employees need less time to complete their tasks, so they can do more work than before or spend more time with customers to increase customer satisfaction.
And the bottom line is clear:
One TOA customer has reduced dispatcher count by 60% without any negative impact on operations. Only positive results ensued on all levels.
Another customer of TOA’s is performing the same amount of field work they were doing three years ago, but with 18.5% less technicians.
And employee/employer relations have a new life.
May 12, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
Yesterday I was at The Cable Show in LA mingling with elite of the industry at receptions where all the CEOs (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, etc.)of the industry were present.
It was interesting to hear that there was a lot of thinking and talking about the future of the business. Clearly people devoting mind time to how they can stay ahead.
I attended a very interesting conversation with Brian Roberts with Peter Chernin. It was clear he was thinking about the business all the time -(in fact he said that he is constantly thinking that the whole edifice would come down on him – he said “that’s what I have Steve Burke for, he always see the glass half full and I ALWAYS see the glass half empty – I thought that was interesting). He was talking about how Comcast is dedicating a lot of thought on how to improve the customer experience both in terms of content and technology. He was very proud to show off Comcast’s new interactive guide interface, which was indeed impressive. It was clear how much thinking is going on about the customer experience at the level of the customer interaction with the content.
But WE know that the most important interaction is the human connection.
And though Brian Roberts did say that the cable industry is the industry people “love to hate” – he offered clue into how Comcast is intending to transform the customer experience as it relates to the one time that people will actually see a Comcast person face-to-face, i.e the in-home appointment.
So today I went to check out how things are going at the level of the earth, not the stars – from the pinnacle of glamour and power, to a day spent with a tech – with one of TOA’s customers’ people in the field.
And somehow there were a lot of things that seemed the same to me. He was also thinking about how to make the customer experience better. Crawling in attics and closets… drilling, hooking and thinking how best to do things. But the difference was that he was there on the front lines – in people’s homes, under their carpet and inside their kitchen. It’s amazing how intimate this job is. People let you into the most private parts of their home and life without much reservation, exposing their most intimate physical space. Maybe it’s because, at the end of the day, the cable guy is just another sort of handyman, I don’t know… but it’s a fact that you get to see a LOT when you’re on this job. And it’s a hard job, both physically and mentally, to be the front line of the industry that ‘people love to hate’ as Brian Roberts put it and do a great job – which the guy did!
And if that’s the case, and you have great people doing a tough job, working one by one to transform the image of customer service – it behooves the leaders to provide them the best tools and the best methodologies to help them do their job with the least annoyance and disruption – to search and find the most innovative technology – software and hardware – to take away the burdens of the job and let them focus on what they do best and need to do best. Interacting with the customer well. It will pay dividends more than any great menu driven interactive guide – as well thought as it might be.
