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App as a Form

2010-02-08T14:39:46-05:00

Sign-up forms on your website are a critical component for any successful SaaS company. Are you paying enough attention, or are you putting the responsibility on your prospects to navigate rough waters?

Taking this thought further, most SaaS applications are an in-depth form with specific functionality wrapped around it. With that thought in mind, how much time is spent during the development process thinking of the interaction with your SaaS as a conversion opportunity?

This post from the Conversion Room Blog is geared towards your website forms, but the information is extremely valuable when it comes to application design, as well.

Our HelpDesk Ticket software is a very clear example of the “app as a form” concept.

The thought of each interaction with our HelpDesk as a conversion opportunity is brand new to me. I’m hoping to get feedback on this concept to flesh it out further.

One complication that many SaaS products will encounter is their highly configurable nature. Taking into consideration your clients’ desire to add more and more fields to your standard form will certainly increase the amount of care needed for pre-launch design.

How will the conversion rate change when too many custom fields are added?

Will the intended “simple” feel of your application be lost once a local administrator has their say?

How can you preempt this common behavior?

Thinking of our application as a conversion calculator for organization’s support structure is interesting (to me). What would our conversion funnel --for brand new clients-- look like from logging in through work order request completion?

Hunters and Gatherers (sorry, Seth)

2010-02-03T12:08:56-05:00

Note: I apologize to Seth Godin for a post of similar names on the same day. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone when I saw his post in my reader this morning. I kept the “Gatherers'” part even though his “Farmers” is probably more accurate due to the active nature of farming versus the passive nature of gathering.a

Hunters and Gatherers are roles that are critically important to every civilization throughout history. Your organization (expecially your sales team) is no different.

The key to successfully building your sales team is identifying up-front who on your staff fits each role as both are needed.

Gatherers are task-oriented and better suited to cultivating your current client-base for up-sells, cross-sells, and farming for referrals. They are people who are better suited in roles of consistency. Gatherers are able to identify potential trouble areas and apply the right amount of care to get them back to a healthy state. Meticulous, observant, and patient are key attributes for your Gatherers.

With bigWebApps HelpDesk ticket software, it is vitally important to maintain our referral percentage above 90%. This is the lifeblood of any SaaS model. SaaS Churn is discussed from a mathematical stance by Joel York in a recent post on his must-read Chaotic Flow blog.

The continual revenue stream from renewals affords the company stability for those periods of drought that your company is certain to experience. Are you making sure your Gatherers are getting the praise that they deserve? It is easy for them to be over-shadowed by the glitz and glamour that comes along with your Hunters’ new business.

Hunters, on the other hand, are not naturally gifted at the tasks necessary for cultivating your current fields. Hunters are restless folks who excel at tracking moving targets. The challenge of finding the right spot, establishing a valuable working relationship, and bringing them in as a client is what motivates them. Hunters must be challenged in a different way than Gatherers. Going to the same fields each and every day throughout the year not only doesn’t excite them; it demoralizes them.

Hunters have the ability to boost overall morale at a company. At bigWebApps, we intentionally communicate “big wins” throughout the company in an attempt to let them know that without their specific services, the Hunter would not be able to perform.

Growing our business with both Hunters and Gatherers for our HelpDesk ticket software is vital for the future of the company.

Renewals are for today. New business is for tomorrow. (note: this statement is being contended internally. more to come in a future blog post)

bigWebApps is currently looking for Hunters for our Atlanta office. If you are interested in hunting with us for our HelpDesk ticket software, click here to see the job description.

Photo Credit: The Library of Congress. Click on the image to see their Flickr photostream.

Happy 9th Birthday, bigWebApps!!

2010-02-01T22:48:45-05:00

Thank you for being a part of the bigWebApps community over the last 9 years.

The best present you can give us on this monumental occasion is to continue giving us your feedback on how we can improve the product for you.

Here’s to another great year of building the bigWebApps community to fit your team’s needs!

Thank you!!

The Human/Humane Factor

2010-01-18T13:36:47-05:00

I first want to say I am writing this post not as an attack on the vendor, but as a desperate plea for them to fix their customer service processes.

I think I literally break out into a cold sweat when I realize I have to pick up the phone and try and talk to someone over at Comcast. Ultimately I think the product they provide (mostly talking about their high speed internet) is decent and it is nice to get such a service at a reasonable price. However, I do think it’s odd that residential customers get exactly the same type of service as a business grade customer receives at nearly half the cost…but that is outside the scope of this point. I feel they try and ‘sell’ you that if you are a business grade account then you get preferential service and direct line support. This is totally inaccurate based on my experience.

Today, I had a simple question about charges made to our account. Earlier this month we had our service disconnected and it appeared we were about 10 days past due on our payment (100% our fault and for some reason the bill just got skipped). When it went out I called them up to see what it would take to get restored. After nearly a 3 hour ordeal (this is not being exaggerating either) which included busy signals, numerous dropped calls, and transfers to nobody I was put into an automated system to take our credit card and ‘refresh’ the internet signal for service. Did it and done..right? Wrong. We waited and we waited and waited… Decided to call it for the day and try tomorrow. Next day we were able to get someone on the line who said they had not received the payment and offered to take it from us over the phone. Perfect. We processed the transaction and 10 minutes later we automagically had internet. Now fast forward to today. We received the credit card billing statement and lo’ and behold we have been charged twice. Grrrrrrrrr……. I knew what was coming…another Comcast phone call :(

The story repeated itself with numerous dropped calls (I actually pressed 4 for additional services just to see if I could get someone…I did!..but he transferred me and the phone eventually went to a busy signal). I then tried the on-line chat (transcript below) as a shot in the dark and you guessed it..nada..zilch… I am at a loss at what to do now expect send an email out and just request for someone to call me. I hope you guys know I won’t be holding my breathe.

What I want to point out is that people like dealing with people. People buy from people and they expect when things go bad they will get people to help them out. In cases like this it seems companies are so department and process driven they lose sight on helping their customers. I can’t stand the comment ‘Oh that is not my department, let me transfer you’. Am I saying that one employee should be able to resolve all of a customers issues…ehh probably not realistic, but I do think they should be able to find out or talk to someone who does know how to resolve their person’s issue. I watched a good post on mixergy.com about a company called Aptimize. The CEO Ed Robinson was dead on when one of his top 5 traits of a good sales company is to have a good support process. People will only tolerate bad support for so long until they look for alternative solutions.

Response Message Box and Next Step

2009-12-14T11:24:24-05:00

My absolute favorite type of upgrade to any of our applications is when we make current functionality simpler to use for our clients. Improving efficiency is at the core of everything we attempt to build here at bigWebApps, and it’s even more exciting to me when we don’t have to build a new feature to accomplish this goal.

Response Message

The improvement that was published this past weekend that fits this bill is to how response messages are sent to the end user and technician of a ticket. Prior to this update, there were three separate boxes to send a message or add a log entry.

As illustrated in the screenshot to the left, this functionality is now combined into one control.

To add a log entry without sending any notifications, simply uncheck all parties associated with the ticket represented in the list.

If there are multiple technicians associated to your ticket, then they will be listed out one-by-one in the technician line.

Help Video for Response Message can be viewed here.

Next Step

Next Step is a new functionality added to the HelpDesk to give your support staff better visibility at a quick glance beyond the subject line of a ticket.

It’s hard to see in the limited space of this blog, but the highlighted text in the capture above (highlight added for emphasis) is additional text separate from the subject line.

An example of this in a real world case would be if you have a ticket for a printer issue. You have determined that the print cartridge is bad, and you have ordered a new one. You could add a Next Step such as “waiting on print cartridge delivery”, so when you are looking at your worklist you immediately know where that service request stands.

Help Video for Next Step can be viewed here.

I would love to hear any feedback or questions you have about these two features… or anything else to do with our products and/or company. Send us an email to support@bigwebapps.com or call (866) 996-1200 x 2 for support.

Love your SaaS!

Introducing Alternate Technician

2009-12-09T10:04:54-05:00

One of the most frequently requested features here at bigWebApps is the ability to communicate from a ticket with other technicians inside the HelpDesk.

Introducing Alternate Technicians!! (scheduled for release on Saturday, December 12, 2009)

Alternate Technicians is the ability to add connections to multiple technicians to a single ticket. Once other people are added, the user and technician can include the newcomers on emails that are sent via the ticket. This will give you and your support team an improved communications platform during the life of service requests.

Here is a 2 minute video explaining how it works.

Click here, if you can not view the video inside this blog post.

If your organization has YouTube blocked, you can access the video here.

One feature to note: At the time of this video being recorded, we did not have the ability to add an alternate technician without transferring the ticket. That option should be available once published to production. You will find this as a third selection on the transfer ticket page.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. You can send your questions and comments to support@bigwebapps.com.

Love your SaaS!

Providing the How Not the How-To

2009-11-30T13:18:42-05:00

New technology is not always about inventing a better process.

Many times, your client may already have a fantastic map of how they perform a specific function for their organization. When you encounter this, is your SaaS application ready to be the tool that helps them better execute on their plan? Or is your application built in a way that forces them into what you perceive (or at least market) to be a “better” way of doing things?

Building your application in a way that allows your client base to transition through your offering is one key to building a successful sales process. The decision maker that your sales team is talking to may agree that you have a “better” process, but she does not feel it is worth the pain of interrupting her team’s flow for incremental benefit. This is one of the toughest roadblocks to encounter as a salesperson. The best response your team can have for this line of thought is to have the transition process well documented based on past successes. These are very specific case studies that don’t talk about long-term success with your product as much as it focuses in on the successful launch of your product.

Getting a prospect to envision her and her team successfully crossing the bridge is the primary goal. Your product is going to make her team more successful. It’s your job to help her visualize the navigation of the trip.

There are times when a prospect’s process needs to be sent to pasture, but on the flip side of that coin are the cases where your application needs to merely grease the wheel of their current model.

Related Tickets (Sub-Tickets)

2009-11-19T19:54:00-05:00

We are excited to announce the release of Related Tickets (also known as Sub-Tickets) for the bigWebApps HelpDesk!

Click here to watch a two minute tutorial video.

(NOTE: Some of the formatting on screenshots below is different than in the video. The screenshots are from our beta site and are the newer format.)

Click the “Related” tab to see all relationships that this ticket has with other tickets in your system.

On the Master ticket’s Related screen, you will see the two sub-tickets associated with it. From this screen, you can also “Find existing ticket” to add more ticket relationships.

On one of the Sub-Tickets’ Related screen, you can view that it has a relationship with a Master ticket and a side-by-side relationship in the “Related Tickets” section.

NOTE: Currently, two Sub-Tickets under the same Master ticket are not automatically “Related”. This is currently a manual relationship that is set.

Once again, we are excited about having this base-line functionality for sub-tickets available to use now. We will be working on further functionality of this feature in the near future.

If you have any questions or would like to provide your input on possible enhancements, please send that to support@bigwebapps.com.

Love your SaaS!

Active Directory Replicator

2009-05-21T16:11:11-04:00

bigWebApps is taking new initiatives to open up its web based help desk software to supporting and complimentary technologies. We are enabling the HelpDesk platform to work with many layers across an organization’s business units from accounting to project management. One of the newest advancement is integration using Microsoft Active Directory to allow single sign-on for all user account access. We call this AD Replicator and this function will copy users in the local Active Directory groups to map to your HelpDesk Roles (e.g. Administrators, Technicians, Users, Super Users).

To read more about this feature, the install process and requirements please check out our HelpDesk manual or contact us at 866.996.1200 ext 701.

Client Value to Acquisition Cost Calculator

2009-05-19T15:27:22-04:00

Inspired by Peter Cohen’s blog post about How Much Marketing Spend is Enough, the calculator below will help you determine what your client acquisition cost is compared to their lifetime value.

For business owners, this tiny piece of data is one of the most critical bits of information that you should track on a consistent basis. If you don’t know this number already, check your performance below.

If you are in early stages of starting a business, this is definitely worth the time. It is also imperative that you are brutally honest about your numbers. This is not the time to present the hopes & dreams numbers that you used with your potential investors.

If you have not started your business yet, use the calculator below with honest projections. This will help you get a feel for where your price needs to be to survive IF you are able to deliver the number of clients that you hope.

Tips for using the calculator:
-Type numbers in the BLUE fields only
-If this is your first year, the first two sets of numbers (New, ALL) will be the same
-If you are not a recurring revenue model, the Avg. lifetime of clients will be 1
-Include salaries, commissions, and marketing spend in the Sales/Mktg Costs
-This is not an end-all to all costs. You must also have solid budgets for R&D, Operations, and other important aspects of your business worked out.

After using this calculator on bigWebApps’ 2008 numbers, I was very pleased to see a 2.40 score. Due to a few big deals early in 2009, our number is an unsustainable 6.78 which should correct over the course of the year.

What’s your score? Have any feedback?