Weekly dose for SaaS entrepreneurs

If you are selling SaaS to customers, why not walk the talk and use SaaS tools for your own business? Here is a good article showing simple things you can automate when starting out…

Are you on Cloud 9?
via PrudentCloud.com

Startups are a rage in emerging economies. Look at India, China or Brazil, you will find hundreds of startups sprouting all across the country. It just has become so easy to start and market a web business (even in developing countries) – increased broadband penetration, inexpensive computers, smart-phones, easy access to the Internet, free-for-all social networking tools and above all, the availability of software tools that were either out of the reach of a small business or expensive and cumbersome to setup.

Startups today have no IT infrastructure of their own. They are lean, agile, and small. They work virtually using applications that are hosted in the Cloud. According to Wikipedia, a typical Cloud Computing provider deliver common business applications online which are accessed from another web service or software like a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.

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I came across this interesting discussion happening on LinkedIn about how SaaS vendors can measure whether their customer service is successful or not?

One metric mentioned is that every user of your service is a potential user needing support.

So if a small amount of your users are actually asking for support and this ratio of users v/s users asking for support is reducing then maybe your product is user friendly and the customer service provided is successful.

Another organization tracked how many support requests did not reach the right people in their organization, and secondly how many support help cases were not documented. This gives us an idea about how to organize a support system within a SaaS company so that user feedback is well received and accessible even at a later date.

This feedback can tell the company which way to upgrade its product and also give invaluable user insight.

How do you measure your customer service?

Interesting to hear that Jive Software has avoided SaaS and have gone to offer a Private/Public Cloud for their Jive Express software (read here).

A Private cloud could be a good sell to enterprises whose primary concern is about ’security’ and ‘privacy’ but that does not mean that larger companies will not use SaaS. In fact, as the author has pointed out that “Salesforce, WorkDay and other vendors have demonstrated that enterprises will adopt SaaS despite concerns over security”.

Lets see how Jive Software’s strategy plays out.

Another good article on how cloud computing will change business. I think there is some overlap between SaaS and Cloud but overall, businesses are going to be consuming software through the Internet - whether its in sales, product development, marketing, communication, collaboration or support.

This is a good article that shows how Indian consumers, businesses and entrepreneurs are starting to use SaaS when kick-starting their business. SaaS’s low cost, ease of use and scalability makes adoption easy and hassle-free.