Why Customer Service is An Investment Not A Cost!

September 27th, 2016 by inflectra

Companies often see customer support as solely an expense to be endured and ideally minimized. However at Inflectra we have always seen great customer service as a competitive advantage and an asset on our balance sheet. This was recently brought home to us by two separate customer experiences.

You Sometimes Get a Second Chance

In the first story, we had a prospective customer that was interested in using SpiraTeam to manage their project's requirements, testing and software development. They had already decided on using SpiraTeam and were about to purchase when their IT group told them that they already had SAP Solution Manager and they could reconfigure it to meet the needs of the testing team. We were disappointed (and so was the customer), but that's the way life goes we thought...

Two years later we get an email from the same customer letting us know that the SAP Solution Manager implementation didn't work out so well and that they were giving SpiraTeam a second look :-)

In the second story, we had a prospective customer that was looking at SpiraTest for their test management.They had some specific needs around being able to execute multiple test steps in a single page (which SpiraTest v4 was not able to do at the time). They chose a different tool and let us know that they felt that without this feature, SpiraTest was not usable for an experienced testing team.

Now it would be so easy to be defensive and explain that we have many customers who were happy with the way SpiraTest worked and that they were wrong in their views. But as a legendary retail giant said - "the customer is always right", so when SpiraTest v5 was released, we included additional test execution options that included a new "table" view.

We never expected to see the customer again, but a year later that same person came back to evaluate SpiraTest v5 and was very pleasantly surprised to see the new user interface and has since become a customer...

So always listen to your customers, not just merely 'hear' them ;-)