No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
Monthly Archives: January 2009
2009
From the IT Examiner: SaaS is poised to expand
In a downturn there is always opportunity.
Enterprises today face enormous pressure to cut IT expenses. That takes the form of layoffs, lower capital expenditures (capex), and fewer strategic application initiatives. Even when an enterprise chooses a solution, time to market can get dragged out. And that hurts, because it delays payback.
But to us at TimeTrade this as an opportunity, because SaaS is a prudent choice for lean times. Aharon Etengoff wrote about it in Tuesday’s IT Examiner, saying 42% growth in SaaS is expected in 2009. He quoted IDC research director Robert Mahowald:
“Revenue from SaaS services will increase in 2009–2010 more than we previously estimated. SaaS thrives in down cycles, and as with the 2000–2001 downturn that gave Salesforce.com its start, the current freeze in IT and related Capex spending will help assure solid growth for most SaaS providers.”
SaaS is known to have two key benefits for enterprise adopters, but at TimeTrade I’ve seen a third. The obvious ones:
- Capex is eliminated, and there’s no longer any question that it consumes less IT resource. This means enterprises who adopt SaaS don’t face the traditional delays required to get capex approved, purchase servers, and schedule the application into their data center’s always-overloaded queue. Instead, SaaS providers provision the solution in their own hosting center. It’s ideal for lean times.
- SaaS provides much faster time-to-benefit because it comes up faster. The application gets in front of the customer quickly, which in turn shortens the horizon to achieve the original objective.
The third, though, is not so widely discussed: those factors mean whole new applications become possible through SaaS, enabling breakthrough revenue opportunities.
Case in point: Web self-service appointment scheduling. TimeTrade was born of the Web (during the dot-bomb downturn) and lives on the Web. The appointment engine that started out serving a one-man diveboat charter can today serve huge photography chains and massive retail businesses.
SaaS scales, and it lets customers tune their investment to the moment, conserving capital. It’s a lean and agile strategy. So I agree with IDC: as uncertain as 2009 may be, SaaS apps are the best bet in town. For good reason.
Ed Mallen is President and CEO of TimeTrade Systems.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
2009
Making It Through the Downdraft, Part 1: Operational Efficiency
Let’s talk reality.
People say we’re in a downturn. I think it’s worse than that; it’s a downdraft: a movement that creates suction, pulling more things down with it than the situation itself would justify. This is legitimate cause for concern. But facing reality is the only foundation on which we can build a solution.
I think if we’re realistic, we have to see that there are tough times ahead, and for many people those times are already here. NPR’s Morning Edition ran a wonderful piece this week on Little Luxuries Faring Well In Flagging Economy
, about how people are cancelling dinners out and spending more on good wines at home, cancelling cruises and indulging in chocolate massages at spas – and they got lambasted with a slew of angry comments from people who wish they could afford such “little” indulgences.*
People are already hurting.
As business managers we face the question of what to do in this climate, how to weather this storm, this downdraft. Indications are that it’ll take years, so don’t bleed your company while you hope it’s not true: the time to tighten your belt is now.
Operational efficiency is the new rule. Look for ways to get the job done with far less effort:
- Don’t waste a thing. If you have a service-based business, sell every time slot. It keeps your revenue up, but that’s not all – it keeps your unit cost down, and that in turn helps your customers.
- Conserve human labor. Save your human capital to do things machines can’t do.
- Be smarter than your competition. Execute better on all of these, and you’ll be less likely to scrape your hull.
Here’s some shameless self-promotion that’s entirely relevant: Web-based self-service appointment scheduling (which we’ve been doing since 2000) lets customers go online 24/7 and pick a time – one of your unsold time slots – so you don’t have to spend human capital taking the appointment. That’s operational efficiency: you sell more time slots, yet you spend less time doing it. And you leave fewer slots unsold.
Plus, if you can take appointments at 10 p.m. but your competitor can’t, which one is more likely to make it through the downdraft intact?
*Update 2/25/09: Despite the protests from those angry, hurt people, there are signs the NPR story was on the money, so to speak. Last weekend my local TV station said they’d been talking to local businesses, and restaurants were down while liquor stores were up. (No chocolate massages in my neighborhood.)
Filed under: appointment scheduling
Tagged: customer satisfaction, customer service, efficiency
2009
It’s RUDE to make people wait. And costly.
DMDC, the Defense Manpower Data Center, handles issuing security credentials for the Department of Homeland Security. “People show up at the enrollment centers at different times on different days,” explains Rick Pratt, identification management specialist at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), the prime contractor supporting the Defense Department’s (DoD’s) card issuing process. “The centers would be empty some days, and some days they would be packed.” DMDC has about 900 sites with more than 2,000 workstations issuing common access cards (CACs.) Issuing the identification takes about 15 minutes if there are no delays, but applicants sometimes reported waiting five hours due to long lines.
Wouldn’t that just frustrate you? And if it were a store, wouldn’t it affect your loyalty?
Well, they installed a TimeTrade appointment scheduling system, and now that doesn’t happen. People who need credentials go online and make an appointment 24/7. They check their calendar at their leisure, see what slots are available, and pick one. No more wondering how long they’ll be away from the office, no more walking in and going “Oh crap” when they see the lines.
Does it work? DMDC did what everyone should do: they asked their “customers.” In a large-scale online survey, 95% of respondents said they’d recommend self-service appointment scheduling to others. Reasons included ease of use, efficient use of their time, and elimination of unpredictable in-person wait times.
In other words, 95% of people surveyed like it when rudeness is replaced with good customer service. We doubt we’ll win a Nobel for that discovery, but you do have to ask: Why doesn’t everyone do it?
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