I should note that even before having a SaaS of my own (or SaaSifying HelpSpot which will be coming soon) I was bad at taking time away. More a personality trait, but still it’s another layer of stress/concern. At least for me.
To me this is a big quality of life issue. I do not like to talk to people on the phone. It’s disruptive: I still have a day job, and in the evening I have a family. It’s generally a waste of time, and so on and so forth - the long and short of it is that I just don’t really like it. It does work well, as when I do talk with people on the phone, it’s generally pretty easy to close a sale, but it’s just not that fun in most cases.
Recently, I had a customer hounding me for a phone call, who was a ‘toxic customer’ in many other ways ( http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/12/09/how-to-detect-a-toxic-customer/ ) and I just refunded her money and wished her luck. It felt so good: it was the beginning of a 3 day weekend with friends up in the mountains, and I was able to go with no worries or stress.
Closing an easy sale isn’t fun?
Making the world a bit better for a few thousand people is still something worth doing IMHO.
Certainly! If people are paying for it, they’re getting value out of it.
Honestly? No. Sure, it makes me happy and puts me in a good mood, but it’s not ‘fun’ like other stuff is. I’m not a phone person.
@ian, I imagine that a significant percentage of a Helpspot user’s lifetime revenue comes from the support contract. (Have you previously publicly broken out those numbers?) Assuming it is, a major portion of the revenue comes from a recurring charge (albeit an annual one) and requires someone to be non-away from work.
In all cases, however, doing support for a customer-hosted app has got to be easier – less work and less cost – than actually running the app itself, SaaS-style.
I haven’t broken it out. The support contracts are nice and a good chunk of change, but licenses and license expansion (the 10 user license that turns into 90 over a few years) is really important. We’re just getting to the point where the breath and duration of our customer base makes support a very sizable % of revenue, but up until more recently licenses were the life blood.
Support costs are very significant for on-premise apps. HelpSpot support per user is significantly higher than Snappy (SaaS) even if you include the cost of servers and some DB consultants we’ve used a few times. The reason is people contact us when IIS is broke, Exchange is acting funky, they can’t get it installed on their 9 year old Windows 2003 server that has 100 other help desk trials running on it, etc.
We also don’t have access to the server at least initially so there’s a lot more back and forth with the customer to see what’s up, to get access if we need it or do a screenshare, and so on.
That said, you almost never have a situation where you’re running around with your hair on fire because every single customer is offline and yelling at you. It’s always a one off thing. The only exception I can really think of would be if you had a security issue where someone was actively exploiting it on all your on-premise customers. I’ve never had that (knocks on wood until knuckles bleed) those are usually reserved for big install bases worth exploiting, but still. It could happen and does keep me up once in a while thinking about it 