This Saturday I get to stand in front of a crowd of small business owners and pontificate on growing your business through excellence in customer service. On my mind recently has been the issue of Software as a Service – because that’s what we deliver with our online booking system. One of the main reasons we’ve been as busy as we have been (and I do have to say somewhat successfull) is that whilst we deliver software as a service (in that it’s a hosted application and not a boxed product) we concentrate very hard on delivering services with the software.
I wonder if there’s a new term for that – SaaSwS perhaps? For us, it’s pretty obvious that not everyone is going to want to build their own web page or booking form or set up their own online payment pages. They want someone else to do it for them, whilst they concentrate on what they’re good at : organising their event or selling their stands. Our challenge is to keep the cost of the services reasonable enough. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t as people’s perceptions of what things should cost are so broad and variable.
Had a lovely conversation yesterday with an academic who has tried out a little bit of entrepreneurship. We worked with him as co-chair on a conference earlier this year and he was so “massively impressed” (his words!) by the service we offer that he’s going to bat for using our service on another conference next year even though his colleagues (who weren’t involved in the first one) want to use another set up that has a lower obvious cost… Although he knows as well as I that the actual cost will be higher than using us.
It was an inspiring conversation, and makes me all misty eyed as I heard a happy customer explain to me why he would be insisting his colleagues used our service. Wish I could have videotaped it! Darn, why didn’t I think of that at the time.
