Does your SaaS honor its Customer Service or its Contracts?

Getting to know their culture is the first step

I am a lifetime downhill skier. For nearly 50 years, I have been hitting the frozen slopes in direct defiance of King Boreas's control over subzero temperatures in my state. Downhill skiing is my middle finger to winter in Minnesota.

As a skier, I am quite familiar with the purchasing of lift tickets and the assumed liability of the sport. If I was curious about my risks and responsibilities while skiing, I could pull out a magnifying glass and read the legal disclaimer written in micro-print on my lift ticket. There is no need to read about the assumed liability I take on when I slap a pair of waxed boards to my feet and slide down a steep, icy, rock protruding, and tree ladened mountain because, quite frankly, the inherent danger is the thrill of the sport.

Several years back, I traveled to a ski resort in Northern Minnesota for a weekend with my family. Upon purchasing my lift ticket, the ticket agent slid a two-page legal document towards me and directed me to sign it. The legal form I was required to sign codified in writing my assumed risks while completely indemnifying the resort from any and all liability from this known risky sport I was about to embark upon. I sighed as I signed the legal document and, as I handed it back to the ticket agent, I commented that there are too many lawyers in the world. The ticket agent explained that she agreed and informed me that the new owners of the resort comprised several lawyers. Figures, I thought to myself.

I skied that weekend at that Northern resort but have chosen never to return. Why? Because a business that places a contract as a higher priority than customer service will always fall short in providing the latter in favor of adhering to the former. The three types of individuals you do not want to run a business are doctors, lawyers, and accountants. The doctor makes decisions based on mitigating health concerns, the lawyer makes decisions based on limiting legal liability and the CPA makes decisions based on reducing financial risk. Running a business with those three types of individuals at the helm feels a lot more like a bureaucratic government agency than an entrepreneurial enterprise. Getting the most out of life while in the pursuit of happiness sometimes requires calculated defiance of health concerns, legal liability, and financial risk. No one, for instance, would purchase a motorcycle if mitigating health risks was their top priority.

The same assumption of risk exists when stepping foot on a golf course. The flying hazards of hail-sized white projectiles hit by scores of plaid and polyester wearing weekend warriors errantly raining down on unsuspecting people is the inherent risk one takes when entering upon grounds of a country club. For a visual of this peril, watch this clip from a documentary on the subject titled, Caddyshack. With the multitude of $800 per hour attorneys belonging to golf clubs, it is only a matter of time before legal waivers will be required upon entering a private club. We live in a litigious society and, thanks to a bevy of "slip and fall" attorneys, I can see the desire of businesses to attempt, via legal documentation, to protect their investments.

But some companies take the contracts further. For today's topic, I am targeting SaaS companies. For those unfamiliar with the term SaaS, it stands for "Software as a Service." SaaS is now a vital part of many business operations. For my beloved restaurant industry, we simply can not operate as efficiently without our SaaS partners. Some examples of our SaaS software investments are reservation systems, labor scheduling software, accounting and analytical programs and on-line ordering platforms. Most of these SaaS services are set up on either percentage of sales, increments of numbers seated, monthly service fees or a combination of all three.

I have been analyzing and purchasing restaurant software for over thirty years and have learned that the best indicator of SaaS partner success is not in the forward-facing service they offer but in the company culture they portray. Because of the nature of SaaS contract existing on month-to-month billing cycle as well as the need to always be innovating their platforms to keep up with the hyper-speed of technology advancements, customer service is their job number one.

I am currently embroiled in a contract dispute with a yet unnamed but very popular restaurant SaaS company. We migrated away from their service a few months ago because they failed to provide the second criteria listed above, they failed to keep up with the innovation of their product. For detailed reasons for why that happens to well-known SaaS companies, see a prior article I posted on this phenomenon titled, The SaaSy Lifecycle.

For this SaaS company we left, their contract is their culture. Somewhere, buried in the bowels of their customer contract in the terms of cancelation, they stipulate that the service must be canceled in writing 60 days prior to the anniversary date of the initial agreement, or the contract automatically renews for one additional year, thus obligating the user to continue monthly payment even though they are not using the service. I have ten entities contracted with this SaaS company all initiated on different dates. Who, in my restaurant world, tracks contract initiation dates, much less 60 days prior to contact date deadlines for cancellation agreements? Furthermore, the "in-writing cancellation” must be done via their website using their cancelation form. It is easier to locate the a Winter Carnival Medallion buried under three feet of snow using daily cryptic clues posted in the newspaper than to find and execute this company’s cancelation form on their website. Getting to a human representative is even less possible as they will only communicate with me via email and each correspondence is a mirror of the language in their contract with no interaction or acknowledgement that I indeed met their requirements and deadlines for cancellation of our agreements. I used to think I was communicating with an inanimate AI bot ion these email exchanges, but the heartlessness of these emails leads me to believe there is a real human behind it. AI would be more compassionate and respectful.

As my SaaS criteria states, matching the culture of a potential tech company is essential in the process of assessing their value to my organization. To get a notion of our company culture, our motto is, one customer, one plate, one time. Since SaaS contracts require monthly and/or percentage fees, they must earn my business every month. I will be attending the upcoming RFDC in Las Vegas next month and will be meeting many tech companies vying for my attention and business. Assessing whether they can technically fulfill my tech requirements is the least of my concerns. Learning about their culture will be everything.

My company recently and exhaustedly went through an RFP process for a new payroll provider. In the modern world, payroll providers are just a more complicated version of a SaaS company. We whittled the candidate companies down to the four we believed could fulfill the technical aspects of our payroll needs. We then embarked on the hard work of learning about our finalists' cultures. All four companies had polished and well-informed sales teams. All representatives their respective companies admirably. But none could hide their culture from us. For the last month or so of the RFP process, we continued to meet with prospect companies' executives. Although their inclination was to continue selling us on their SaaS products, we pushed inquiries into their culture. We asked, "what is their visioning" questions. We interviewed their employees about how the company treated them. And yes, I asked point black, what are their succession plans? It was important for us to know if the prospective company was in business for the long haul or were they merely using my partnership as a steppingstone to a big merger or accusation? Again, refer to my previous post, The SaaSy Lifecycle for why that is an important question to ask.

I will state here, one on the payroll finalist and one that had proven to us that they were competent and reliable at delivering the services we required, has an association with the embattled SaaS company that I am in the dispute resolution stage regarding cancelation. That mere fact that the SaaS company valued their contracts more than my business relationship sealed their fate. Despite that company’s investment in time and sales force training, they lost the bid because of their legal priorities were greater than their customer service commitment.

Finally, when considering SaaS companies to partner with, assess the value those companies place on time and financial resources. Prior to our current SaaS environment, implementing software systems was a cash heavy burden. First the software was purchased. Then came expensive networking and hardware upgrades. Lastly there were big costs for data conversion and training on the new platform. For most companies, purchasing these old software platforms represented one of their major annual capital expenses. Although “renting SaaS verses owning software, along with greatly reduced hardware upgrade expenses have greatly reduced the upfront costs of implementing a new software, the cost to migrate data and train on the new platform is still extensive. The cost of time and treasure for this is on both the SaaS and end user company. A large part of understanding a company’s culture is having mutual respect for each other’s investment in the time and personnel required to make SaaS transitions successful.

For the restaurant industry, SaaS partnerships are now essential for our operations. The success of those partnership starts with accessing SaaS company culture. The company whose philosophy matches our “one customer, one plate, one time” culture will be the winner of our future SaaS partnerships.