How can SaaS vendors provide unrivaled support to your organization?
By demonstrating how the product/service works and will help my organization36%
By providing a free trial of the product/service59%
By providing training for IT and product users54%
By providing strong customer service41%
By providing consulting services18%
Other (please share below)4%
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A demo or trial may not be adequate. Other options may be more appropriate. As a prospect I might want to have a comprehensive customer reference visit, where I could see the solution in action and talk to their inhouse IT people to discuss their integration and rollout experience. Understanding this is big ask, another avenue for validating a SaaS solution is a pilot where the key business processes and technical touch points for success can be validated. I've seen too many instances of applications, both SaaS and on-prem, that might have worked wonderfully, but were not configured or integrated adequately to meet business needs.
Better customer & technical support for customization
I chose customer service as if they are doing that, the other categories will be done
True, I went with the demo option - but that's because a good vendor should know when their product is not the right fit. <br><br>Counterintuitive, but if they have canned demos that tries to be one size fits all then they don't really ubderstand how their product will help.
Even if one could demonstrate ROI on SaaS offering, the offering fails with a customer due to low adoption of the software, particularly so if the end customer is not an IT firm. There is a tendency to overestimate user-friendliness of the software or the skills of the customer (customer employees) to work with it with ease.
A SaaS vendor who -
1. puts little extra effort to estimate how tech-savvy is their end customer(people working there)
2. can identify the barriers to adoption,
3. hand holds customer until the adoption is objectively satisfactory,
can provider unrivalled support.
Once a customer gets used to a tool, it is very difficult for them to change. A SaaS vendor must aim to reach that stage where customer/employees of customer resist the change.