Software as a Service and Customer Service

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If you provide software as a service (SaaS) on a subscription basis, and one of your customers needs your help, give it to them.

Let me tell you a story.

Back in the day we used to use AlertSite for our uptime and performance monitoring. 

They were affordable and most importantly flexible.

Any time we spun up a new service or were in the process of evaluating other services they were really good about letting us spin up a 30/60 or even 90 day trial.   We did this on numerous occasions.   Like when we started using Marketo, and noticed a huge difference in the up-time that they reported with ‘actual’ up-time.   It worked in their favor.  The majority of the time those monitors turned into actual revenue generating monitors.

When renewal time rolled around, and I looked at other alternate services.  They weren’t always the cheapest, but we still used them because they were good to work with. 

Then one day something changed.   I need to monitor something for 30 days on a trial basis and they said ‘no’.   I’d need to buy a subscription. 

What happened next?   Well they lost us as a customer.   We moved to neustar/Webmetrics.  All and all we’ve been happy with them.

Until…

Until I need to use/evaluate their DNS offering.   I needed it for less than 30 days, about two weeks to be exact.  Guess what happened?  I got the hard sell, I got the “No, we do 1 year minimum commitments.” 

So instead of having a great opportunity to let me use it in the real world and earn my business, the pushed me into a corner.  A corner that will likely cost them the Webmetrics business at renewal time.  

So when your customer asks you to jump, especially when your cost is essentially “Zero”, yes the right answer is “How High”.   Don’t look at me like I’m your next meal, because you’ll get 0 meals from me, and lose what you used to get.   Treat me right as a customer and I’ll treat you right as a vendor it really is that simple.

Software as a Service and Customer Service

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If you provide software as a service (SaaS) on a subscription basis, and one of your customers needs your help, give it to them.

Let me tell you a story.

Back in the day we used to use AlertSite for our uptime and performance monitoring. 

They were affordable and most importantly flexible.

Any time we spun up a new service or were in the process of evaluating other services they were really good about letting us spin up a 30/60 or even 90 day trial.   We did this on numerous occasions.   Like when we started using Marketo, and noticed a huge difference in the up-time that they reported with ‘actual’ up-time.   It worked in their favor.  The majority of the time those monitors turned into actual revenue generating monitors.

When renewal time rolled around, and I looked at other alternate services.  They weren’t always the cheapest, but we still used them because they were good to work with. 

Then one day something changed.   I need to monitor something for 30 days on a trial basis and they said ‘no’.   I’d need to buy a subscription. 

What happened next?   Well they lost us as a customer.   We moved to neustar/Webmetrics.  All and all we’ve been happy with them.

Until…

Until I need to use/evaluate their DNS offering.   I needed it for less than 30 days, about two weeks to be exact.  Guess what happened?  I got the hard sell, I got the “No, we do 1 year minimum commitments.” 

So instead of having a great opportunity to let me use it in the real world and earn my business, the pushed me into a corner.  A corner that will likely cost them the Webmetrics business at renewal time.  

So when your customer asks you to jump, especially when your cost is essentially “Zero”, yes the right answer is “How High”.   Don’t look at me like I’m your next meal, because you’ll get 0 meals from me, and lose what you used to get.   Treat me right as a customer and I’ll treat you right as a vendor it really is that simple.

Cisco, umi is stupid.

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It’s been a while since I’ve looked at or played with a product that pushed my buttons enough to write a rant.

Cisco umi, is just such a product.

What is umi?   umi is John Chamber’s delusional Telepresence vision for the consumer.

High Definition telepresence for the consumer, yep you read that right.  Video conference on your HD TV.  With tilt/pan/zoom support and it can even record it for you so you can play back those awkward family teleconferencing moments at a later date.

umi01 

But wait, that’s cool? What’s dumb about it?   What’s dumb is that it’s $599 for the unit.  While that doesn’t seem all that bad, when you consider I paid less than that for most of my Hi-Def TV’s that’s kind of pricy.

For starters, it’s a consumer product, and Cisco Sucks at anything with a user interface that isn’t command line so expect this to be hard to use.

Second, you will need two of them, so that’s $1200.

For that money, I’d send my parents at the other end a PS3 and a PS3 Eye camera, total cost:  $350.   Then they’d have a blueray player and decent video game system. 

Best of all, NO SUBSCRIPTION fees.

that’s right, Cisco charges you $24.99 a month (1 year contract), or if you’re smart you’d opt for the annual plan for a whopping 9% savings at $274.99 Annually.

I don’t understand what you get for that?  A directory service so you can find your parents/grandparents on the other end?

So you’re looking at $599 x2 and $274.99 x2 for this?  That’s a lot of jack.

Also listed in the things you ‘Need’ are:

- TV with HDMI, while most people have that, I suspect none of my parents or grandparents do (yet), and I have little desire to telepresence with anyone else at this stage.

- Broadband, and a good one, with at least 1.5mb up.   That’s more rare than you might think and that’s just for 720p calls.  1080 requires 3.5mb UP.

Video is what it is, but I know few folks with that kind of reliable up-stream bandwidth.

Given that now FaceTime is free on all apple products and the plethora of other options out there, while they aren’t true HD are far more than adequate.

This is dumb Cisco, very very dumb.

the iPad is good, iTunes Pricing is out of whack.

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I recently got my hands on an iPad.  I’ll be the first to admit I thought the iPad was kind of stupid.  After all it’s just a big iPod Touch or a big iPhone without the phone.  Then I played with one and got to thinking this isn’t so bad.

Well after a couple days of living with it, it’s pretty darn useful.  It’s sleek, lightweight, good battery life, and fairly usable.  eMail is good if you like email the Apple way.

For a 1.0 product it aint too shabby.

I highly suspect some useful improvements in the coming releases.

* Multi-tasking is a must have for this.  While most apps are good at letting you pick up where you left off, when you need to bounce around to collect some info for an email, it’s kind of tough. 

* The keyboard is surprisingly useful, although it’s not real well thought out.  You don’t need to type much to figure out some symbols are hard to get too.

* Editing a wiki with html like source is darn near impossible for example.   Yeah, I can use an Apple BT keyboard, but I need more control with that keyboard.  Maybe an apple keyboard driver to make the function buttons do stuff will help.

As for a multi-media device, this thing is pretty sick.  Great at browsing the web, and playing tunes, movies and TV.

In that regard the iPad is about 100x more useful than a netbook.

It’s strengths are simply:

* a Good web browsing experience, even if it is Safari-Lite

* email, the email integration is good and when iPhone OS 4.0 features come to this and you get a unified inbox, I’m sure it will get better.

* Lots of apps and games, some good ones are even free.

* of course it’s an iPod so it’s got your music.

* TV and Movies.

The biggest gotcha with using this is that you feel like you’re at an amusement park.  Meaning every time you turn around there is something that’s going to cost you money.  Very little added value is FREE.

Good apps cost money.  Out of the box I had to drop $30 on pages/numbers/keynote.  Another $20 on a good pdf viewer and a utility to be able to copy files over the airwaves.

This thing is good at video, but where do you get video? iTunes of course.  Which means $$$.

You can use the ABC app to watch ABC video online, but that assumes you have a connection, you may not, and you’ll be forced to watch commercials.

I frequently grab TV shows I miss, in torrent form and put them on my media server at home to watch.  I’d like to do the same here.  But as we know that’s not easy or fast.   First you have to download them and none are in apple format.  So then you have to ‘rip’ them.  That takes time and resources.  Then copy them again into iTunes. 

Here’s where things bother me. 

I pay roughly $100 a month for digital cable, with DVR.  I can watch and record what I want when I want it (and pretty much skip commercials).

That works out to $3.33 per day.  

Or in iTunes pricing la-la land, at $1.99 a show (plus tax) = $2.13 per episode, that allows me to buy 47 episodes or 11 shows per week.  (If I want to do without cable).

That might seem like a reasonable value, but when I consider that I can’t really get everything on iTunes.  (Most sports aren’t there and they certainly aren’t live), that narrows the selections of what I can use this for.  Basically just TV shows and select movies.

Let’s just say there are (3) shows I don’t want to miss.

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Those 3 shows together add up to: $139.97 plus tax.   That’s entirely too much.

Realistically, I’d plunk down:

$10 for a season of each or $30 total to be able to watch them in Hi-Def any time I wanted without a connection needed (meaning I’ve downloaded it locally) and without commercials.  That’s more realistic to me.

So in the interim, until pricing gets reasonable, I guess I’ll have to do the download, and rip solution.  In which case they get $0…

The same thing goes for movies. 

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$19.99 plus tax is entirely too much for a digital copy.

$5.00 is acceptable, just saying.

I really dislike XM/Sirius now.

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So the only place I use XM is on my motorcycle.  XM has value for me, as I typically like to ride long distances.  It’s not unusual for me to say ride 2400 miles over a 3 day weekend whilst rallying.  (yes you read that right twenty four hundred miles).

This certainly means I’m all over the place and being able to listen to a consistent signal or station is a good thing.

XM is pretty consistent on the highways, but when you’re in the mountains (which is where we prefer to ride) it can be spotty.  Especially when you’re on the north east side of the mountain.

So, being that I live in the North East, motorcycling unfortunately isn’t a year round event.   From sometime in November to at least the end of February, with a few exceptions the bike gets put away. 

Every year I call up XM, explain to them that I don’t need the service until March.  They threaten me with re-activation fees but when I persist they have usually discounted those months.  Enough so that it’s still worth it for that rare winter day around here when it hits 50 degrees and we go out for a ride.

Since the XM/Sirius merger, there isn’t any competition.  You can’t play one off the other any more.

I picked up my bill this year to start the negotiating process that happens every winter. Only to come to a few new realizations that really bothered me.

XMBill

I remember last year being promised the price wouldn’t change for, I *think* 3 years. 

So what’s the strategy?  We didn’t raise our prices, but we now have to charge you a music royalty fee.  WTF?

This irritates me.

I *may* not even listen to music, in fact I generally listen to sports, or the comedy channel.  Their 80’s channel only has 100 songs, if you ride a 12 hour ride you will hear all of them, often twice.

I’m not against the artists being paid, but I am against XM billing me for a line item that is simply part of their cost of doing business.

Very few industries can do this.   I don’t patronize car repair places that charge me a line item ‘rag-fee’ or ‘fluid disposal fee’, and I likely won’t patronize XM any more.

I also get dinged $2.00 so they can send me an invoice.  I’m perfectly happy to receive this digitally, but no, I’m not going to let them auto-charge me for anything.   When they auto-charged my credit card in years past they couldn’t seem to charge me the same amount twice (even though my subscription didn’t change)

This year, they have a new feature.  I am apparently not alone.  They now let you suspend your account.  So that later you don’t have to be threatened with re-activation fees.  They also get to continue to list you as one of their ‘subscribers’ albeit a suspended one.

So for now I’m a suspended subscriber.  Helping to dilute your royalty fees.  I expect that will remain until I just have to have it for a big trip.

We’ll see.