I’m trying to keep with the theme of breaking down the advantages of MVaaS solutions like ours into very simple and easily understandable chunks.

One of the key differentiators between MVaaS and traditional DVR solutions, which comes from the Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, is the ability to rapidly incorporate customer feedback into the service and make that immediately available to all of the users of the service without effort on the users part. I wrote an earlier post about the importance of actually following through on the feedback loop or risk wasting this advantage.

It would be easy to say something like “we can incorporate customer feedback faster” and leave it at that. Problem is that this requires you to understand what the SaaS model is and why it makes this a true statement. Instead, let me give you a very real example.

Here’s a picture of part of our service as it looked just a couple days ago:

Notice the search capability at the bottom of this widget.  The reason it is there is to make it easy for a user to find their specific location without having to scroll through a lot of sites or open a bunch of categories or subcategories to get to their location.  Imagine you have access to close to 1000 sites (maybe you are the CEO or maybe you are in loss prevention).  You certainly don’t want to have to spend time navigating around trying to get to a specific site.  The buttons above were patterned after common Internet Explorer type search functions that enable you to search and then go to the next or the previous occurence of whatever you are searching for.  Rationale was Internet users would be familiar with this and so this would make perfect sense to them.

Sounds good, right?  Unfortunately we missed the boat on this one.  No one ever used that capability and at the same time we got a ton of feedback that it was a pain to get to your site.  Our initial thought was “hey the tool is right there, just enter your store and hit the search button – isn’t it obvious?”  The feedback was “No one knows what that is.  What is with the down arrow and what does perv mean?”  Okay – point taken.   Users weren’t getting it.

After talking to users, we came up with the following:

Search function after user feedback

It may not be as clean looking (sorry James) as the original design, but it is much more intuitive and works well for our customers which is all we really care about in the end.

So why was this different for us than it would be for a traditional DVR solution?  Another DVR provider could say “Hey we talk to customers and get feedback and roll that into our next release too”  Certainly they do.  Let’s then focus on the timing and logistics of making this happen.  We had the conversation with some customers, agreed on the design, and rolled out this new look yesterday (a week after deciding to make the change).  What did all of the IT organizations at each of our customers have to do? Nothing.  What did all of the users of our service have to do? Nothing.  They logged in yesterday and it looked different and suddenly they weren’t thinking about what “perv” meant and were thinking “wow I can just enter my store # and find my store – cool!”  In another couple of weeks we’ll be pushing more new functionality and improvements out and again this will require no effort on the part of our customers.  Two weeks from decision to make a change to every single user on our service benefiting from that change – with no effort required from any user or IT person.

How would this work with a traditional DVR provider?  First, they would likely only be able to do this in their annual (or maybe they do 2X year) release so the customer would have to wait for a while.  Second, once the DVR provider was able to make a new release available, the customer would have a project on their hands.  Use our biggest customer as an example.  600 locations installed, over 1200 users with varying levels of access.  With a traditional DVR solution they would have to decide whether and how to deploy the upgrade to each of their 600 DVRs in the field.  Think upgrading Microsoft Office on your computer, but try to do it remotely over a DSL connection, in the middle of the night so you don’t interfere with the store when it is open.  In the words of Rob Hagens, “this is non-trivial”

You finish that after a bunch of effort.  Now you have to worry about 1200 users that are using the client version of the DVR software on their laptops, home computers, etc.  Try to get them all to upgrade to the new client version (b/c if they don’t they won’t be able to use the old client to access the newly upgraded DVRs.)  Hope that you got to everybody so that you don’t get out of synch with what version of what client is on what computer trying to access what version of what dvr software on the dvr itself.  Get it done?  Good.  Hopefully that didn’t take your IT team too long to do and hopefully users didn’t get so frustrated in the meantime that they stop using the video for a while b/c they don’t think it works.  The good news is that the traditional DVR won’t have another upgrade for several quarters or a year, if you get one at all (you may have to buy one) - so you won’t have to go through that again anytime soon.  Even if the vendor said they had a new release next week with some cool new customer driven feature, would you want to go through this again or would you scream and hide until next year?

Sorry for the long post – I”ll just close with “MVaaS solutions can incorporate customer feedback faster” and leave it at that.