Guest blogger Robbie Wiggins, a FoodLogiQ Customer Success Manager, shares insight on SaaS and why this unique business model provides so many benefits to customers.
Once upon a time in 1995, a travel and expense company was making its way through the ranks by selling hardware in the form of CD-ROMs and floppy disks (remember those?). With an eye toward the future, the company made the decision in 1998 to begin selling software licenses, instead of hardware, to enterprises. Soon thereafter, the dot-com crash of 2001 happened, but instead of caving, this company again leaned in, pivoted, and instead of selling hardware or software licenses to enterprises, it began selling software licenses to anyone that had access to a browser.
And just like that, SaaS was born. By the way, that company is Concur, and they ended up selling to SAP in 2004 for $8.3 billion. Not bad, right?
So, why the history lesson? The acronym SaaS gets thrown around quite a bit, and while there is debate on where it actually has its origins, most business people are familiar with the acronym. SaaS stands for Software as a Service, and it is substantially different from the traditional model in which companies would sell a product to a customer and collect payment. Instead, SaaS relies on a recurring revenue model, requiring the money to be collected on a monthly basis or whatever the contract stipulates.
While the SaaS model has become commonplace, it’s worth exploring, since it presents both unique challenges and opportunities for the company providing the service. In terms of challenges, it means that companies have to work even harder to provide both an excellent product and service in order to keep their clients, because gone are the days when a client paid for a product up front and then was stuck with it for a year or more. Now in the internet age, with so much information readily available and so many options at a customer’s fingertips, they can easily find another software provider. On the flip-side, if a company recognizes this challenge, it also presents an amazing opportunity to gather customer feedback and use that data to inform internal teams about the importance of building the most robust, customer-centric product possible.
Why all the talk about SaaS? Allow me to explain. My name is Robbie Wiggins, and I’m a member of the Customer Success team here at FoodLogiQ. And, you guessed it, FoodLogiQ is a provider of software solutions for food safety professionals, enabling them to manage their suppliers and gather data and making it possible for them to analyze and strategically use that information they’re receiving. And yes, FoodLogiQ employs the SaaS model.
For the Customer Success team, the service portion of SaaS is something we hold near and dear to our hearts. We understand that good service is what keeps customers around, while poor service is the biggest driver for them to leave, a reaction that costs businesses a lot of money. In fact, it can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a customer than to keep a customer.
At FoodLogiQ, we’ve established processes to ensure that throughout your customer journey, you have a customer success manager available to:
- Align on your goals: We aim to understand your needs, set reasonable targets, and provide measurable results for you and your team.
- Build a strong partnership: Our team guides you through the onboarding process and assists you in configuring business requirements, while providing best practices and recommendations along the way.
- Gather customer feedback: We value open and honest feedback, so we want to know both what’s working and what we can do better. Customers can even submit ideas to improve the product in our idea portal.
- Empower customers: We want to take the steps necessary to ensure that customers feel comfortable and knowledgeable within our product. We can help with trainings, technical support, and have a knowledgebase available to answer many of your questions.
Those are just some of the ways we hope to make our clients successful, but certainly not all. Our Customer Success team embraces the opportunity the SaaS model provides us: that is, being ever more aware that we must work hard to listen, gather feedback, and provide industry best practices to help you succeed in achieving your goals and provide top-notch service along the way.
To learn more about how FoodLogiQ can help you manage your supply chain for safety and quality assurance, request a demo.
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