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SaaS: Vendors find that Customer Service is a Vital Element in Retaining Customers
More than half of small and medium sized businesses are using SaaS and another 37 percent say that they plan to begin using SaaS services within the next two years. That’s the result of a survey by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) of IT groups within 544 mid-size companies. And given the knowledge that there are many under-the-radar-from -IT projects underway at many companies, maybe if they would have surveyed staff members outside of IT the numbers may have even been larger.
But there are challenges with SaaS too. ESG also examined what some of those challenges are for mid-sized companies when implementing SaaS. High on the list of challenges is the ability to be able to provide SaaS application support to their staff members. While 37 percent of organizations have a dedicated customer service manager in their organization, 27 percent said that they have problems delegating a dedicated support person, so being able to get good support from the vendor is very important to them. Coming up to speed with training on the SaaS product can be difficult too — the report found that only about a quarter of SaaS offerings provided online training for their products. Poor training and inadequate customer support led nearly half of SaaS customers to ultimately drop their SaaS service.
Bill Lundell, Senior Research Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said that “the results of this survey show that inadequate customer support has the ability to quickly negate all of the promise offered by SaaS-based applications. Businesses are crystal clear on the benefits of SaaS, especially for business-critical applications like email, but many providers appear to be providing inadequate levels of support. With more businesses potentially turning to SaaS applications and other hosted services in the coming years, providers will need to offer dedicated support and increased transparency around any product updates or issues in order to improve customer satisfaction.”
