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Solve360 Scores in Loyalty Test
By George Curnew
Fred Reichheld, author of "The Ultimate Question, Driving Good Profits and True Growth" is building a legion of supporters for his approach to measuring customer satisfaction. The Economist refers to him as the "high priest" of loyalty; the New York Times declares, "[He] put loyalty economics on the map."
The CEO of American Express, Ken Chenault, says Reichheld is "at the forefront of helping organizations understand the importance of customer loyalty in driving performance. All companies should ask their customers what Fred calls 'the ultimate question'."
According to Reichheld, the ultimate question - Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague? - allows companies to track promoters and detractors and produces a clear measure of an organization's performance through its customers' eyes. The "Net Promoter Score" or NPS, is the percentage of customers whose answers identify them as promoters minus the percentage whose response indicates they are detractors.
According to information at the NPS site, the average firm manages around a 5% to 10% score, while many well-known firms and some entire industries have negative Net
Promoter Scores. Examples of high performers in the software and computer sectors are Intuit (58%) and Dell (50%). The chart below shows the NPS distribution of North American companies in all sectors.
As part of a recent broader customer survey, we asked our entire customer base the Ultimate Question: Would you recommend Solve360 to a colleague? Users could choose between 'Yes', 'No' and 'Never Thought About It'. For the purpose of calculating our NPS, we counted only the Yes responses as promoters, and the No and Never Thought About it answers as detractors. Based on responses from the 80.2 percent of our users that completed the survey, our NPS is 48.4. Below are the results in more detail:
Would you recommend Solve360 to a colleague?
| Yes |
74.2 |
% |
| No |
5.2 |
% |
| Never thought about it |
20.6 |
% |
| |
| NPS Calculation |
| |
| Percent promoters |
74.2 |
% |
| Percent detractors |
25.8 |
% |
| NPS score (74.2% minus 25.8%) |
48.4 |
|
While our score is much higher than the average 5%-10% and compares well to some of the high-performing firms Reichheld singles out in his book, we believe that another dynamic is working in our favor. In the business SaaS (Software as a Service) arena where users pay subscription fees, there is no "performance grey zone" from a customer's perspective. Either a service has the features and functionality an organization requires, and performs close to flawlessly, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, users won't stay; conversely, the right tools reliably delivered creates loyal, satisfied customers. We've spent a lot of time and energy understanding our customers' needs, and have created a purpose-built application and delivery infrastructure to fulfill those needs. Aside from the public IP network and the Web browser (both of which are manageable variables), we control every aspect of our users' experience. More than 74% think we're doing it well enough that they'd recommend Solve360 to their colleagues. Our challenge going forward is to understand what it will take to turn the detractors into promoters.
Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.
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Safari Now Works With Solve360
By Norada Corporation
PALO ALTO, CA (MARKET WIRE) Norada Corporation, the provider of the Solve360 communicating and collaborating Web solution for small business, announced today that the service is now available to Macintosh users using the Apple-native Safari browser.
"Following the release of Safari 2.0 for OS 10.4 and 1.3 for OS 10.3, we set to work optimizing the service so that all the features - email, team scheduling, contact management and CRM tools, personal and group file sharing - work as seamlessly in the Mac environment as in the Windows world," says Norada CEO Steve Ireland.
"Whether a small business is Mac-based or uses a mix of Macs and PCs, with Solve360 users can get a full suite of proven Web-based productivity-enhancing services today, with none of the IT headaches associated with desktop or server-based solutions," adds Ireland. "While products such as Microsoft Office Live are still in beta, Solve360 is being used all day, every day, by thousands of small business customers around the world. And now Mac users can reap all the productivity and cost benefits of the Software as a Service (SaaS) revolution."
"As a startup with a mix of Macs and PCs in the office, Solve360 meets all of our collaboration, file sharing and online archiving needs," says Ryan Keating, VP Finance of WisdomArk, a VC-funded internet startup based in Mountain View, California. "We're 12 people today, with plans to grow aggressively in the future. Getting everyone in the office on the same Web service lets us focus on building our business instead of building an IT department."
Ireland added that new Solve360 features due for release in the next quarter - integrated invoicing tools and enhanced, archivable instant messaging - have been built in response to customer requests to continue extending the platform. "On the invoicing and accounting fronts, Mac shops are effectively shut out of using products such as Intuit's QuickBooks Online or Sage's Act for Web because they don't support the Apple OS, much less Safari specifically," says Ireland. "We're keenly aware of the needs of our small business customers. With more than 30 percent of our customers having Macs in the office, we know that everything we're doing has to be designed to work with OS X and Safari."
About Norada Corporation
Norada Corporation's Solve360 turns familiar software product categories upside down by tightly integrating the functionality of business-class email, CRM contact management, group calendar, task, document management, and invoicing into a single, robust, easy-to-use Web-based application. Solve360 provides all the benefits of installed software without the hassle, high cost or complexity of a traditional desktop application. Product tours and a full demo version of Solve360 are available at www.norada.com
For further information contact:
George Curnew
Norada Corporation
Phone: (650) 331-7336 ext. 8
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Archiving Avoids Email Panic
By Norada Corporation
For most people, inadvertently deleting or losing an important email causes panic. Unfortunately, unless you have a true email archiving system in place, digging up a specific email from a normal backup is, at best, a hit-and-miss proposition.
The key concept to understand is that that an archive and a backup are not the same thing. An email backup is simply a snapshot of the status of an email system at a specific point in time. If the backup is performed daily at a specified time, and an email was received and deleted between backups, it's never been backed up and is therefore unrecoverable.
Even if it was backed up, chances are high you'll never be able locate it as it would take days of a technician's time to search and restore the range of backup files. Why is the process so time consuming? Most email systems save the email messages inside a single mailbox file or database - before you can identify what messages are in a backup file, the entire mailbox file or database must be restored. It's unlikely you'll remember the exact date and time the message might have been in your account, so to find that message, you'll need to restore the daily backup set for every day you thought the message was saved in your account. The reality is that searching for a message in backup files is akin to looking for a needle in a warehouse full of haystacks.
These are the three most common situations when a message won't be caught in a standard backup process:
- Incoming messages that are received, read, then deleted before the daily backup snapshot is taken
- Outgoing messages that are sent but not saved and retained in a Sent Items folder
- Incoming messages that are downloaded to a desktop email program or mobile device and automatically removed from the server (e.g. POP clients)
There is no substitute for making a regular daily backup copy of the entire email system - in case of equipment failure or theft, the email system and user messages can be restored to the same state they were before the problem (here at Norada we do full backups twice per day).
Email archiving systems that capture all the activity in users' accounts are generally too expensive for small businesses to consider. Norada solves this problem by providing an inexpensive email archiving service that records all the transactional activity in a user's account - just like a flight-data-recorder does in an aircraft. Every incoming and outgoing message, and every attachment, is recorded in a separate file. At the end of each month, those files are moved to a DVD and sent to our customer for permanent safe storage.
Adding emailing archiving to your Solve360 subscription effectively means you can keep all your email and all your attachments forever. If you need to produce an important email - no matter when, no matter what the reason - it's at your fingertips even if it's no longer in your inbox.
More information on Norada's unique archiving solution for small business is available here.
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Web Tools Worth Buying
By George Curnew
As a small business, Norada expects a lot from the Web services it uses to get work done. Even free services that aren't critical to our operations, such as RSS readers, are expected to perform reliably with little or no care and feeding required; a couple of burps or ill-timed hiccups in one of these throwaway apps and the bookmark gets deleted.
Web tools we actually pay to use are held to a higher standard: they are expected to perform nearly flawlessly all day, every day. Before signing up for a service that will cost us hard-earned cash, we spend a lot of time looking at competitors, evaluating features and making sure we understand the upside and downside of using the product.
Being a Web service company ourselves, we're probably a bit savvier than most small businesses when it comes to sorting the good stuff from the bad. As a result, there have been few surprises with the reliability and usability of the Web-based tools we've embedded in our day-to-day business.
We selected our IP-PBX provider, RingCentral, because they provided exactly what we wanted at what we considered a fair price compared to other hosted and non-hosted alternatives. We've been able to consolidate all our voicemail and fax services (including routing and call forwarding) in an online rather than on-premise location, which means everyone has access wherever they happen to be working. As a service business, our call volumes fluctuate; we only pay for what we use, and the solution scales to our needs. While we have the technical skills in house to manage our own PBX, we chose to outsource and keep those technical assets focused on our core business.
We've been a PayPal customer since the early days of the service, and it's become the payment method of choice for nearly 40 percent of our customers. Even though Norada and Solve360 have been around for a while and we've demonstrated we're honest and upstanding corporate citizens, we understand that some customers might be a bit anxious about handing over their credit card numbers to us. In those cases, PayPal serves as the trusted arms-length payment processor, and the fees we pay are lower than traditional credit card rates.
You'd have a hard time prying the Audiovox 6600 Pocket PCs from the oversized belt clips of Norada's technical folks. Going for lunch or beers with a staffer who has one of these strapped to his waist, you'll hear a stream of chirps, tweets, TV show theme song excerpts and other quirky audible confirmations that yes, indeed, the Solve360 production servers are operating within established parameters. In addition to receiving SMS alerts, the technical wizards use them as wireless magic wands to monitor system performance from a user perspective, over the public IP network.
Each of these solutions lets us work faster and smarter, and ultimately helps us make money. The only other mission-critical Web service in our shop is Solve360, which we use to manage all our communication and collaboration, customer relationship management, file sharing and scheduling. If this wasn't our business, it's one of the first things (along with accounting and legal) that we'd be looking at outsourcing to a company like Norada.
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Web 2.0: Real Or Hype?
By George Curnew
Small businesses looking for better tools to help them run their operations face a daunting challenge sifting through the chatter in the Web applications marketplace. Blogs are buzzing with predictions of how the nascent Web 2.0 revolution will change the way the Internet works, the IT media is dutifully covering the resurrection of ASP as SaaS (Software as a Service) and anointing SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) as the Second Coming of IT. Off on the edges of the radar screen, gangs of bright Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs gather at the technology equivalent of potluck dinners to plot the future of the Online Universe and introduce fresh new buzzwords into the lexicon. Fueling the frenzy are legions of VCs, looking to be the first investor in the next eBay or Google, lobbing $5-million care packages into startups. Meanwhile, a mainstream media that has no idea what's going on is eagerly churning out anecdotal stories as proof of emerging trends. It has the feel and the smell of 1999 all over again, except this time everyone is convinced they're smart enough to see a bubble forming and that their exuberance is warranted.
How is a small business intent on making intelligent IT decisions to make sense of it all? What's real, what's hype, and what's merely the evolution and refinement of tried and true ideas and processes? Perhaps more critical, how can a small business determine what companies have, or are likely to have, real products and services that represent a best-practice implementation of the New World Web paradigm?
A good starting point is pinning down this Web 2.0 beast. The top level Wikipedia definition of Web 2.0 is: "...a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes." While relatively succinct, that one-paragraph description doesn't translate the concept into something that's obviously relevant to small business. Web 2.0 Messiah Tim O'Reilly (whose company, O'Reilly Media, Inc., and MediaLive International simultaneously coined the term and created the conference to propagate the idea in 2004) fleshes out the idea in multiple dimensions on his Website. It's a chewy dissertation that effectively defines the new playing field for existing and emerging consumer-focused service companies, but offers little insight into what impact it all might have on small business. After 15 pages, O'Reilly finally coughs up what he believes are the seven core competencies of Web 2.0 companies (we've tweaked Tim's wording slightly for clarity):
- Offering services, not packaged software, that scale cost-effectively
- Providing control over hard-to-create data sources that get richer the more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging what's known as the "Long Tail" through customer self-service
- Creating software that is designed to work with multiple devices and networks
- Embracing the concept of lightweight (and inherently adaptive) user interfaces, development models, and business models
To developers who've been in the SaaS space since ASP went out of favor, #1, #6 and #7 hardly qualify as revelations. Much of the Web 2.0 cacophony - primarily focused on the consumer market - is around concepts #2 through #5. While these consumer experiments are interesting to watch, few of the current crop of companies that claim Web 2.0 status are focused on providing new thinking and tools that address the daily operational requirements of small business. Which shouldn't come as a surprise: application development and service delivery methodologies aside, Web 2.0 is mostly about a pretty simple idea - Social Networking - that scores of companies are spinning in different ways.
The acknowledged Social Networking poster kids - companies such as digg, del.icio.us, Riya, Flikr, and memeorandum - are attracting legions of consumer users/participants, but small businesses that were around during the birth and maturation of Web 1.0 will see the warning signs that the ideas need to bake a little longer in the mission non-critical consumer oven before they're ready for business consumption. As with Web 1.0, lessons eventually will be learned (remember early e-commerce?) that can be applied to solving real small business problems and improving processes. The good ideas and companies will survive and evolve; the stupid will perish.
None of which is going to happen overnight. Developing Web software with fully fledged functionality that companies value enough to pay for is no simple task. Building the business-class infrastructure required to deliver the service levels that small organizations demand is even harder, and requires the skills of a team with deep Web 1.0 or enterprise hosting experience. It all comes down to basic needs for small businesses; they want their complex problems solved with software that's simple to use, inexpensive and utterly reliable.
Not surprising, most of the business application of Web 2.0 principles is being led by developers who've culled what's good and real from the marketing machine - such as AJAX, shared data models and scalable service architecture. Other Web 2.0 tenets that seem powerful and intuitively progressive when applied to consumers don't necessarily translate well to a business environment.
For example, applying a collective intelligence model to a small business customer database is a little more complex than giving the "community" access to the data set. The reality is that an individual working inside an organization has three personas and three classes of information in his/her world: personal, business and social. A well designed contacts database model will allow the user to choose whether their contacts are private or shared, and respect the boundaries between personal, business and social interactions. Just managing the permissions and security issues of a shared contacts model that works inside and outside the firewall is a big challenge, much less creating a tool that allows selective harnessing of collective intelligence that can add to the value of that contact information. Taking it to the next level from a business intelligence perspective - making that contact data set interoperable with calendars and other tools that use the same persona and sharing model - would dramatically extend the value of the contact, but goes way beyond what most small companies, funded or not, are capable of building.
Given the fertile ground that exists for providing SaaS solutions to small business, it's surprising that Microsoft took so long to stake its claim. Those who remember or used bCentral will be justifiably skeptical that the folks in Redmond are knowledgeable enough about the needs of small business to deliver anything innovative or truly useful. Still, the announcement of Windows Live and Office Live and the gearing up of the Microsoft media and self-promotion machine have in effect validated and kick-started the small business SaaS market. Quite literally tomorrow, Google or Yahoo! - or even a historically strong small business innovator such as Intuit - could also decide that this emerging small business service market is important, and that ceding the market to Microsoft without a fight would be folly.
So, to rephrase and restate the question, what does it all mean to small business, and how can an organization make intelligent SaaS purchase decisions in a confused and immature marketplace? Evaluating services and solutions against a set of specific criteria important to small business would filter out a lot of the noise:
- Does the Web product or service save money compared to a traditional desktop or on-premise server based solution?
- Does the Web product or service respect how small businesses actually work, or does it force new, inflexible processes on an organization?
- Is the service entirely Web-based and fully functional using a standard browser?
- Does the company providing the service have satisfied small business customers you can contact?
- Does the service roll up a number of my small business processes into one easy-to-use application?
- Does the service help me make more money, or make money more easily?
More often than not, small business owners will get "no" answers to two or more of the above questions, especially from the self-proclaimed Web 2.0 service providers. Getting five or six "yes" answers means you've found a company that has some understanding and affinity for small business, and their solution is worth considering.
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Are You An IT Hostage?
By Norada Corporation
Whether a business flies or flops depends on how well critical core functions are performed, and small business owner/managers are particularly adept at role multitasking. However, unless the business is computer related, or the owner/manager has a special interest in computer and networking technology, stick-handling IT issues almost never makes it onto the "Top 10 Things I Can't Wait To Do Today" list. With good reason. Over the past 25 years, increasingly complex processes and applications have migrated from large to medium to small enterprises. To keep these apps running (many of which require bloated and costly to support desktop clients), many small organizations maintain a sickly, bonsai-sized version of a corporate data center. Sometimes the gear is in an actual room with a locking door; more often it's relegated to a dingy corner or closet somewhere in the office, replete with a rack of old blinking CPUs, spaghetti-cabled routers and hubs, dusty modems, and a bushel or two of manuals and disks that no one can bring themselves to toss in the trash. This is the domain of the "IT Person"; nothing good can come from entering.
The skills, cost and value of a small business IT person (whether on staff or contracted/outsourced) can range from minimal to massive, but there is one trait they all share: they speak in a derivative, English-like dialect peppered with acronyms and initialisms that is foreign to non-IT people. It's unlikely that the average small business owner truly understands what "configuring the RAID array" or "renewing SSL keys" or "sorting out the Port 25 problem" means, and is thus disinclined to engage with the IT Person around how long the "configuring" "renewing" and "sorting" should take, and what value it brings to the operation. This effectively leaves the owner/manager in the position of needing to rely on someone who speaks a different language and lives in a different world to manage key processes that affect the health of the business.
How can a non-technical small business owner/manager bring IT out of the closet and turn what may be financial and productivity liabilities into something that has a positive effect on the business? Start asking questions. Such as what's the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the processes running in-house? The answer should include all hardware (including ancillary processes such as backup), server and desktop licensing, realistic staff/support costs, and some formula for assigning a dollar value to application downtime. Next, ask yourself (OK, ask the IT Person, too, but recognize they may have a vested interest in maintaining the staus quo) what impact achieving higher levels of service at lower cost by switching to a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution would have on the organization. Press your IT Person to think about what's right for the business, and ask them if there's something they'd rather be doing than the busy-work of keeping servers running, installing patches and doing backups.
You'll know you're on the right track if your IT Person comes back with the point of view that a highly specialized networked application, such as CAD/CAM, may not be viable today as SaaS, but it's time to seriously consider shutting down Microsoft Exchange, the file server and any custom contact manager or other shared database. If they suggest that SaaS is a powerful model that moves both application and server onto the Web and replaces clunky desktop clients with a browser, simply nod knowingly and consider that person a keeper. Then have your IT Person contact us; we have a solution that's going to make both your lives better.
Any answers that suggest your current self-hosted situation is OK, or that your bonsai data center really doesn't cost much, or that this SaaS thing is just a fad, should be treated with deep suspicion. In that case, we suggest you close your office door and call us directly yourself.
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