Our Manifesto - Why We Exist

Harnessing the Power of Customers

To make money in the SaaS marketplace requires getting and keeping customers. But SaaS providers face tremendous competition with literally dozens of competitors offering more or less the same functionality. Worse, how can you compete with similar sounding offerings that are free? The answer is to lock-in customers with better Quality of Experience (QoE) than the competition.

There is a lot of room for improvement too: only 36% of customers are satisfied with their experience according to a recent research report into e-service customer satisfaction. But the same report shows that customers will pay a premium for higher QoE. And increasing loyalty just 5% can increase provider profit 85% or more.

In today's information-driven society, it is critical to prevent finding out sometime later an e-service does not behave or perform as expected and required by its customers and users.

SaaS customers today are dependent upon their e-services. Those who depend on and those who provide these e-services form a community, and both want to engage with each other. While neither wants a one-way conversation, for too long the human element has been left out of the conversation because customers had no way to describe what was needed. So they "voted with their feet" and switched to another provider.

That problem is now solved. The SaaS Frontier Platform is an on-demand solution for those who market or support e-services including SaaS. Through the SaaS Frontier Platform SaaS providers gather customer perspectives on delivery quality and value in order to offer better Quality of Experience than their competition.

While operational measurements done today inside the data center are important, they do not measure actual customer Quality of Experience. The nearly blind focus on page loads most e-service providers pursue isn't the answer because Responsiveness is just one of 5 critical dimensions (speed isn't even the top issue -- the #1 Web complaint is Reliability!)

To satisfy the needs of those who rely on SaaS, to address individual and organizational information needs, and improve SaaS provider financial performance requires a focus on service quality from a human, not a technical, perspective. SaaS providers must take control over their delivery and focus on their SaaS Customer Quality of Experience.

E-service customers have expectations for their business applications and services that vary with its importance to his or her job requirements. Solving these problems requires understanding the point of view of those who know best what they need and how well existing solutions meet those needs. Managing SaaS quality and delivery requires measuring and taking action on the perceptions of people, not just the status of hardware and software.

The SaaS Frontier Platform is a self-service Web 2.0 application that measures e-service quality from a human point of view. The SaaS Frontier Platform collects opinions and insight in a structured way, analyzes the information to show SaaS providers what matters most, and explains how to meet customer expectations quality and value.