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Collaboration with the Enemy?

Just look at the lengths software vendors go to trying make new contacts and attract new business. We're all at it, frantically networking away attached to a mid-afternoon pint. It's hard to imagine the City's wine bars being able to stay afloat without us. Then there's the advertising, marketing, PR, seminars and so on - some companies even put CDs on the front of magazines to get noticed. All in the name of marketing to get new clients.

But what about the current customers - how much effort goes in to keeping them happy? If my straw poll of discontented end-users out there is anything to go by, then the answer is "not enough".

I can say with absolute honesty that my company has always spent most of its money on trying to keep the existing client base as happy as possible, but that's largely because we're ex-techies and not always focussed on marketing and selling. Not so, however, the majority of software vendors who need the life-blood of fresh license revenue and maintenance income from new clients coming in at the top to make up for the old ones who fall out at the bottom. They market hard, sell hard and, in the process, probably drink quite hard as well.

And they probably make more money than I do. But this gives the market a problem in that a fiercely sales-oriented ethos is not necessarily conducive to long-term client/supplier relationships which are far better served in a service-oriented relationship. But, in a market over-served by hungry software vendors, the former category tends to make most of the sales. The net result is that the market now has a disproportionate number of users who are dissatisfied with their software supplier.

“The system doesn’t deliver what was promised”. Recognise that one? Thought you might. “We’re not treated as a priority customer as they’ve other clients with more clout”. Yes? “We can’t get xyz function developed under the maintenance contract because they’ve no budget left so we’re having to pay for it ourselves”. The list goes on.

There is another way, though. It’s called collaboration. No, not in the traditional, and largely unworkable, way of multiple vendors collaborating with each other to “maximise opportunity”, or some other camouflage-speak for “united we fleece, divided we compete”, but collaboration between the vendor, its clients and its prospects. It's an odd notion, I grant you, but let's see where this is going.

Users, by and large, know what they want and technologists, give or take, know how to build systems. Conversely, users have a fairly patchy record in developing systems and technologists have a well-earned reputation for not quite grasping the business needs and then blowing the profits away on developments nobody wants. So why not collaborate?

Put a decent software company, one adept at listening to its client's requirements, into a collaborative group of prospective users and keep them together for the entire lifetime of the system. So, the clients get the software company to develop the system that they actually want and then make sure that they keep it maintained in the right way, with an appropriate budget and strategic direction.

You could even give part "ownership" of the product to the user community. Yes, get them to literally “buy in” and jointly collaborate on development strategy, maintenance budgets and such like and then share the rewards. Give the community the responsibility for testing releases - it's their system after all - the software company only wrote it. It's what's called a "community of interest". Each party needs the other to maximise the benefit of the product. If they don't collaborate they end up competing, and clients competing with their suppliers (and vice versa) is not enormously conducive to the long-term relationship that both parties crave.

Daft idea? Possibly, but we shall know fairly soon as a software company from the UK is shortly to be opening its doors in Europe on exactly this basis. And their plans are to pursue a number of disgruntled clients of the more uncompromising software vendors to offer them a very real alternative way of doing business.

To quote from the great lexicon of loathsome management-speak, it’s a “win-win scenario”. To put it another way it means that, from a supplier's perspective, there's plenty of money to be made in the long-term from a loyal and pro-active client base. And from the client's perspective, there are few things better than being in control of your software provider.

-  JTW News