To make money in the services marketplace requires getting and keeping customers. But service 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.
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. Our platform is an on-demand solution for those who market or support e-services including SaaS. Through the platform service provider 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 platform is a self-service Web 2.0 application that measures e-service quality from a human point of view. The 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.
We help e-service providers deliver better Quality of Experience than their competition -- so they can get and keep more customers and make more money.
First of all, our platform is an is on-demand Software as a Service, so instead of hiring an expensive marketing research firm and waiting weeks for results, our customers can measure as much as they want, whenever they want, and for a much lower price. Next, the platform automates and simplifies the process of diagnosing customer sentiment – how customers feel about their SaaS Quality of Experience, or QoE. The platform comes from over 20 years of scientific study into service quality of experience, consumer behavior, and also takes into account multiple industry service management frameworks. Bottom line is that its like having a team of PhD's in marketing, psychology and service management all rolled up into an affordable and easy to use on-demand SaaS offering.
We measure quality and value from an "out-side in" customer point of view. The platform does all the data collection, analysis and then presents a prioritized "to do list" of actions the provider should take if they want to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, purchase decisions and the financial performance of their company. We show exactly which combination of quality and value components our customer needs to improve to satisfy their customers.
Our target market is the established SaaS provider since they face the most competition right now. Today's picky customers have lots of options in the SaaS space, and failing to gain and keep customers is a top concern for all SaaS providers, but especially this group. Smaller and startup SaaS providers are also good targets for us too since they are less likely to have the expertise or money to invest in critical marketing research.
For the future we will include advanced demographics and benchmarking features so SaaS providers can see how they stack up against their competition – not from a feature/function perspective but from a Customer Quality of Experience perspective. Another development area is measuring SaaS customer maturity from a social or community perspective. Such community maturity data will help SaaS providers better understand what to offer and how to package their services for highest returns. Both of these efforts reinforce our core value -- helping our customers get and keep more customers.
Our customer benefits include getting and keeping more customers by offering better Quality of Experience than their competition. This of course means they usually also make more money on their offerings as well.
As you might expect given what we do, we know that the #1 issue causing SaaS customers to switch or cancel service is not being able to reach someone when they need to – so we focus on being available! We support our customers through a well-designed SaaS offering, an easy interface with help at every step, a comprehensive WIKI, a community board, email and of course telephone.