Today Software+Services are defined as a broad area. To define the solutions and products beneath “SaaS”, we often talk about the SaaS Product Stack. This stack represents the complete list of solution and offerings, provided from consumer to enterprise wide applications.
What value these solution brings, are often referred as the SaaS Value Chain. But this chain, has only relevancy for venture capitalists, ceo’s and founders of SaaS companies, and end-customers should look towards, their own chain: The SaaS Customer Chain.
So how wo we define the SaaS customer Chain? This is a most relevant question to all in eager to succeed in software+service. What does the customer chain hold. The elements coudld be defined as follows:
Licensing, Billing, Support, Infrastructure Components, Facility Mangement, Capacity, Legal and Service Management
80% of all customer satisfaction within the SaaS market space, show that superb and customer-knowledge support is the key to prevent churn. So to take our elements and put then into order, I would argue the value chain looks like this:
- Customer Support
- Service Level Management – SLA & Legal Affairs
- Licensing
- Billing
- Hosting
- Facility & Capacity Management
When providing Software+Services, you have to give you customer a plain-vanilla, peace-of-mind expirence, and if not – superb support!
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