Not Another SaaS

If you think too much about how different the technology in our everyday lives has changed over the past few years - let alone the past few decades - your head might start spinning. It seems like there are endless solutions to problems now with a million different tools at your fingertips, right on your smartphone or laptop. You can purchase just about any of these tools over the internet at this point, without having to leave your house or office or even talk to a sales person about it first. All of this is to say: things should have gotten easier with this influx of tools and solutions.

So why does it never seem to feel this way?

On the off chance that you have never immersed yourself in this class of products, the term for them is typically a SaaS (software as a service). Right off the bat, we should have known that this was going to be a tricky relationship. Yes, these products are software, but calling it a service? Feels like a stretch, to say the least.

The definition of service is “the action of helping or doing work for someone.” Sadly, too many of these products are less about doing work for someone and more about providing the perception of help. This is not to say that the products themselves are crap - far from it. However, just because a product is good doesn’t mean it’s helping as much as it could or should.

On one level, SaaS products make total sense. If you create a product and you can sell that product to 1,000 clients without having to meaningfully increase your staff vs. only selling it to 100 clients, that is infinitely better for the bottom line of the company who created the product. It makes the company more valuable to investors, easier for companies to go public, and so forth. From the client perspective, though, this efficiency often creates more work, more cost, or both.  Said in another way, what is good for the bottom line of the SaaS is bad for the bottom line/mental health/time management of the customer. Again, this is not a knock on the products themselves, but more so presents a question as to if the value they provide is geared more towards the seller and not the user.

Recently, we ran into a classic SaaS situation. We signed up for a subscription for a household name product that promised to easily organize certain aspects of our business. Fortune 500 companies use this service, it has commercials on major cable networks (or Hulu, YouTube, etc. if you’ve cut cable), and is generally commended as a high quality product. While the product itself was highly touted, our team quickly discovered that the learning curve for this product was immense. “No worries,” said our sales rep, “we can connect you with an expert who can get everything set up for you.”

Turns out, you not only need the expert to get things started, but you also need someone to then teach you how to use the product. Or, as we were told, we could hire someone who already had the skill set to run the use of the product. For a large company, the math on that proposition could possibly work, but for smaller companies…not so much. We seem to have moved from not just building better mousetraps, but also losing sight of the fact that we really just want someone to catch the damn mouse.

Our recent experience is an example of the SaaS double-edged sword. There are so many great tools out there, but you’re left to figure them out on your own (or pay a hefty fee to have someone teach or use them for you). It’s great to be able to organize, visualize, or create your own products or solutions with these high quality tools, but at what cost? How many hours do you lose for an employee or employees to devote time to learning and using a product that’s supposed to make your life easier?

The research and insights world is no exception to the SaaS craze. There are so many survey tools and platforms out there that promise easy solutions.

Create your own survey!

Easy-to-use features!

It all sounds good, and some of these products are truly great, but the ones that are really good know it and have started adding new and interesting ways to ensure that your subscription fee is just the ground floor. The other piece that these platforms seem to miss (or at least ignore) is that, while the ability to push a button to create a graph is nice, someone still has to interpret that graph and make recommendations based on the results. 

Now, for some companies, this is not a problem. If you already have someone on hand who understands how a survey is supposed to and should be set up, someone who is able to craft the right kinds of questions to maximize what your team learns and who can take the results from your survey tool and properly process and analyze it, this relationship is probably working for you on some level, but what if you don’t? Or what if you do, but you’ve got other things for that person to work on? Is this tool actually saving you time?

For years now, the focus has been on how to replace people with a tool. Most SaaS products pitch their value based on how many people can be replaced with this tool (some make this argument directly). However, even with all of this rethinking of what our world or work will look like in the future, it is also time to start coming to grips with the idea that people add value. More specifically, expertise is the true solution to many (if not most) of the problems these tools try to solve.

As we move into our newly distributed world of work, these tools will continue to be important, but the value is likely to become more and more about the expertise. Trendency started by focusing on its platform as well, but we quickly realized that, because our platform is so unique to the industry and breaks through the confines of traditional survey research, it also requires an in-depth learning of something that doesn’t already exist on other platforms. That means a lot of time is required to learn both the ins and outs of using it and how to analyze the results.

While the initial idea was the creation of a SaaS, Trendency quickly moved into a focus on how to provide help and save our clients time. Our job is not to provide a better mousetrap (although we have that), our job is to catch the mouse.

The bottom line? It’s time to move away from Software as the Service, and instead provide  Service as a Service.

All we need from our customers is an answer to the question: How can we help?