Given that Sift Software Satisfaction Awards were last week I thought it would be useful to find out what’s happening in the support/forum arena for a couple of the saas players.
Almost from day one, FreeAgent (which won a gong for Best Newcomer last week) has used GetSatisfaction. I’m a huge fan of this service and believe it represents the future face of on-demand support. It has the benefit of providing a transparent mechanism by which vendors can communicate with users, answer problems and discover things that customers really want. It does have its downsides. Openness gives people free reing in an environment the vendor doesn’t really control. FreeAgent doesn’t handle multi-currency. This was an issue that turned up over a year ago. It’s hardly surprising then that some users are getting a bit impatient. More important though, it appears that the FreeAgent people didn’t set expectations very well. In the last but one comment, Matthew Ford said:
The main issue I think is that the ‘near future’ has been thrown around for a year. That’s just poor expectation management, if it’s going to be included in the next release and you do, and major releases are monthly, that would be a better indication of how long the wait is.
I appreciate you can’t do everything at once, although we are taking more foreign currency than pounds at the moment (USD & EUR specifically), and it’s slowly becoming a blocker for us. All the other nice features (which other competitors don’t have) will soon not matter.
Handling multi-currency where you are automating the posting of bank records is not a simple matter. Making it something that’s usable by end users is even more challenging. Of course end users don’t care about that any more than I care about the difficulties of sorting out my Spanish plumbing. I just want something that works.
Xero recently introduced multi-currency handling. You can see from their approach that working out a sensible method was far from straightforward to the point where they believe it is a candidate for an extra charge. Could FreeAgent have done better on this topic? Companies can always do better communicating their intentions. I sense in this case that they didn’t realize just how important it would become.
Elsewhere, Adrian Pearson has set up what he calls his ‘side project’ – XeroUsers.com This is a place where Xero users (sic) can come and exchange ideas and get help from other users. Since it’s not controlled by Xero, there is always the risk that complaints might get out of hand. So far that’s not proven to be the case and somehow I doubt it will. There is for instance an ongoing issue around the Flat Rate Scheme for VAT. Again it’s one of those annoyances that could impact a large number of users. However, accountants have found a workaround which they freely share.
In addition, I note that Adrian has dropped a link to his chart of accounts as a sort of template to help out other accountants. He also includes a link for instructions on how to use it. This is the sort of cooperation I have wanted to see from a firm as evidence they understand the value of shared information. Being helpful has a cost but in the long term it has far greater rewards.
These are just two faces of the developing support/help world. Both have their place, advantages and disadvantages. Key to their success though is the extent to which they are open and which vendors recognize as an essential part of how they interact (directly or indirectly) with their customers.
