Why Cloud Vendors Must Make the Service Side of SaaS a Priority

We examine the often-forgotten “S” in SaaS—service—and explore steps the cloud community can take to improve its customer experience.

Customers want to understand how their business will be impacted by future upgrades, including how the technology can evolve to better serve their business needs.

Cloud vendors should use their customer base as trusted partners in developing their technology, ensuring that future releases both meet customer needs and include high-quality, hardened technology.

Some users can experience difficulties keeping up with the pace of a fast-moving SaaS release cycle. While many vendors are overly focused on feature improvements, it’s essential that any new features be adequately and appropriately communicated to the customer base.

A SaaS innovation is useless if a customer cannot integrate the technology into their existing infrastructure or if they’re required to rip and replace other existing systems in order to make the technology work.

As cloud technology has improved, unintended downtime can signify the end of a customer relationship, and planned downtime must be communicated well in advance, with proper precautions taken to ensure a minimal disruption in service.

A service team must be able to prioritize critical issues immediately and communicate effectively to use existing knowledge of past customer issues to solve important problems as fast as possible.

In many industries, a large ecosystem of integration partners is available that can help your team keep customers satisfied. Cloud providers cannot work in silos; they must better leverage this community so that all parties can help provide a quality customer experience.