Martin Leuw, CEO, Simon Guest, customer service director, practice both of IRIS and I broke bread together this week – always a good start. I’ve been critical of IRIS customer service following a series of apparent service gaffs. They wanted to both explain how they approach service and hear my position.
It is clear Martin and Simon feel very strongly about the value good customer service can bring. IRIS takes a multi-channel approach, providing newsletters, behind the ‘paywall’ online support material plus telephone service. Nothing unusual there. They say the company tries hard to both hear and understand customer concerns. My sense is they believe they are succeeding, relative to the rest of the industry, citing the results of the recent IT Faculty report on IT use in practices. I have no doubt that’s true but it’s not enough in today’s ‘zero attention span‘ world.
During the conversation we wondered the extent to which lack of training might be a contributing factor to dis-satisfaction. According to Simon, only 16% of new customers take training but of those that do, 96% say it delivers value. Even if you allow 100% training ‘discount’ for repeat business where training is not required, take up is abysmal. Part of the reason is that most professionals assume staff can readily pick up practice and accounts production software because functionality often mirrors manual practices with which they’re familiar. I understand this mindset. It’s a mistake I made in the past. And paid heavily in both wasted time and the passing on of mis-information.
How can vendors overcome this block to additional spend? There are no pat answers. Price sensitivity has made it difficult to package training and remain competitive. On the other hand, customers who buy product incrementally may think that because they understand one module they only need worry about picking up incremental knowledge by ferreting around the new material.
After out meeting, I called John Stokdyk to obtain his views. He said:
IRIS may be a victim of its own past success. It has low customer churn and it could be that firms expect excellence when in reality that’s hard to deliver consistently. And of course you can’t legislate for people who don’t, for whatever reason, follow instructions, load CD patches and so on.
John’s point is well made. I’m of the view that if customers are not prepared to invest in training then why should the vendor invest in support for this group? While that sounds harsh, there’s a certain logic behind the argument.
Well executed training not only equips staff, but should reduce the number of ‘how to’ service calls. That’s a direct cost benefit to both parties and means support staff can concentrate on issues of concern to all customers. But regardless of how much training people take, there is one area where all on-premise vendors are weak.
Updates are usually delivered by a combination of CD and download. The inherent weakness is that the vendor is wholly reliant on the customer to make the upgrade. Providing a solution as a service (SaaS) means the customer never has to manually upgrade – it happens in background. There is one way the on premise vendors might overcome the problem.
It should be possible for the core program to include a routine where it regularly polls the vendor to discover whether a patch, fix or update is available. The vendor should then send a message to sysadmin who has to make the patch or the system will lock up in XX period in cases of critical updates. The system could then send the update over the wire with a request for automated update.
I came away from the meeting with mixed feelings. There is always much to learn about the internal workings of the vendor community and such sessions provide valuable insights that inform future debate. I do have a nagging sense that like others, IRIS level of customer engagement, while proactive, is insufficient and skewed in favour of vendor broadcast. There needs to be a constant dialogue and that’s not happening. That’s easily remedied.
