Why Support Matters: How to select a vendor with strong customer support
The Business Intelligence (BI) space is changing rapidly, and organizations are moving toward end-to-end solutions that provide mobile and cloud capabilities. Dealing with the issues related to the term “big data” will become a mainstream information management requirement, and will change the way organizations use their data and the strategies they employ to make business decisions. Today, organizations need strong support to reap the business benefits of their BI platforms and lower the astronomical costs associated with implementation and maintenance.
Megavendors have, and will likely continue to, dominate the BI market. Despite the fact that market share movements seemed to suggest a shift toward stack megavendors, customers of these vendors were exhibiting chronic dissatisfaction with BI offerings and customer experience. Lately Megavendors vendors have made effective strides to improve customer satisfaction. However, some smaller players have emerged in the BI market because they were able to provide better software and support offerings.
Small niche vendors continue to dominate the top customer satisfaction spots in many of Gartner’s rankings, indicating that there is still room for the megavendors to improve. Venture capitalists and buyers appear to have renewed confidence in these smaller players’ ability to provide high quality platforms that meet the growing and rapidly changing needs of the market.
As an organization looking to implement a BI solution, there are many considerations when selecting a vendor. However, the majority of a client’s lifetime with a vendor is spent with the support team, and therefore quality support needs to be one of them. Here are considerations when evaluating a vendor’s support.
How much expenditure was spent on support and research and development?
How many employees are working in support and research and development?
What are the vendor’s employment trends? What is the turnover? Are the number of support staff increasing or decreasing?
How many support staff are employed in your geographical location?
Does the vendor have any awards or accreditations related to its support services?
If the vendor was to merge or be taken over by another organization, what safeguards are in place for existing customers? How long would support for current products continue?
What upgrade paths are in place for new software?
Is the Renewal price worth it?
Most organizations will renew their license with a technology vendor if they continue to receive value from the product. The value, and the desire to renew a technology license depends on many factors; however, the level of support you receive will certainly affect your decision to renew.
Ask whether your vendor support team has increased your engagement with your technology by providing tips and updates on using the product effectively or in new ways. Most importantly, however, determine whether support and product upgrades are adding value to the product. Product upgrades should allow your organization to take advantage of new features that allow you to stay on top of trends and use data more effectively. Do upgrades allow you to analyze data in new ways, such as through a mobile device, or use new sets of data, such as “big data”?
Increase your ROI by Saving Time and Money
Implementing and maintaining a BI solution is expensive; many components affect the overall cost of the platform, including licenses and maintenance, hardware, implementation fees, and ongoing development and administration costs. With good vendor support, including rapid answers to questions and a supply of available tutorials and resources, implementation costs can be reduced.
While implementation represents a large up-front cost for organizations, ongoing maintenance and administration is actually where the majority of costs associated with a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) lie. Therefore, organizations should carefully select the vendor that offers a solution that fits their needs, and consider the long-term relationship they will have with this vendor. Vendor support and customer service can significantly impact the costs associated with maintenance and development. Remember that implementing product upgrades is a cost to your company, but upgrades can help to improve the quality of the product, and reduce the costs associated with maintaining and extending the solution.
Switching costs for BI platforms are generally high, but as more companies move to cloud deployments and realize the business benefits in new platforms, you may find ways to lower switching costs, or simply deem that the high costs are worth the benefit. In the increasingly competitive and rapidly changing BI industry, organizations have the advantage of choosing between BI vendors that cannot afford to rely solely on their product; they must also ensure that their customer service and support helps organizations lower costs, speed up implementation, and receive the business benefits that data can provide.