Software or Service. SaaS needs both.

I see lots of IT businesses talk about their SaaS offering focusing on the tech, the first S, Software, but I see very few focusing on the second S, Service.
We too are guilty of this. We have re-imagined every part of Atmail over the past few years to make it a true cloud SaaS from an IT perspective and we are very proud of what we have achieved, but what matters at the end of the day is the service that is delivered as a result of those efforts.

A recent internal post by Simone our Director of Service operations caught my attention. The image below highlights the efforts of continual improvement at all levels and shows how collaboration with one of our customers on the service outcomes is getting results.
The customer has been working closely with our service delivery team, meeting every month to measure what has occurred and then working together on a plan to make it better next month. If you don’t measure it you can’t improve it. These seemingly small changes over time start to take effect and hey presto we end up with a win/win. We receive fewer support tickets and the customer logs fewer support tickets. We are happier and the customer is happier.

Although not broken out in the graphic the 5 major categories we see drive support tickets are:
1. Anti-abuse – from simple spam through to sophisticated spear phishing attacks if you get the balance of technology and human interaction wrong, support tickets are sure to start flowing.
2. Passwords – from user instigated password resets and the use of multi-factor authentication through to the holy grail of going password-less ensuring passwords do their job effectively and efficiently is a tricky balance that once again if not correctly implemented leads to increased support tickets.
3. Devices – Unlike email of 30 years ago no longer do we live in a one device world. From mobiles to desktops and everything in between keeping up with changes in the various operating systems and how they interact with your email service is today a major contributor to support tickets. Whether it be the screen size, accessibility or simply a change in OS security, devices are certainly a hot topic on the help desk.
4. Reliability – When systems go offline you soon know how important it is. Email is one of those services that is ‘alive’ 24/7 and nothing will light up your support centre faster than an email outage. Preventing outages is obviously best, but having reliable and well tested processes to recover is the key to any good service.
5. Security – Let the bad guys take over one of your customers email accounts and it can be game over for their digital lives and your brand. With a duty of care implied and sometimes legislated ensuring the service is secure at all levels of the service is critical today.

Are you focused on the tech of running an email service or the service outcome your customers receive from your email service?

About the Author

Randall Cameron
Director, Global Sales and Marketing
A tech evangelist with over 20 years of enterprise IT sales and marketing experience in the telco sector, Randall leads the alignment of our global sales and marketing teams to ensure customers always come first.