The Power of SaaS Communities and Analytics Showcase

 
Softletter has led the industry in exploring the power of communities and integrating usage, support, and customer satisfaction analytics to drive sales growth and profitability. Unlike on premise and desktop applications, SaaS systems are inherent communities, with customers interacting with your product on a 24/7/52 worldwide. Even better, this interaction can be tracked by your company in real time and analyzed continuously.
 

The result is that SaaS companies are in a position to understand, communicate, and act on their customer's input and wishes with a speed and accuracy never before seen in the high-tech industry. And they need to! The Softletter 2009 SaaS Report revealed that 28% of SaaS companies are releasing major revisions of their product three times per year; 24% have abandoned the traditional release cycle all together.
 

The impact of building a highly engaged and interactive community directly within your SaaS system has a profound impact on every aspect of your business operations. Say goodbye to traditional product management and hello to community managers working to a defined set of metrics. Development, sales, and upper management need to prepare to leverage the power of communities to increase profits and respond to customer wishes at a level of understanding (and accountability) never experienced before.
 

To help you achieve the above, Softletter has invited a small group of select companies to demonstrate advanced community and analytics technologies during the networking session at the end of the first day of the conference. These firms have not paid to appear at this showcase. Rather, they have been invited by Softletter to come to Dallas because we believe you need to learn about SaaS communities and integrated analytics to get a jump on the competition.
 

Dolores Labs, Inc.
 

Description: CrowdFlower is the leading crowdsourcing technology serving enterprise and SaaS businesses. The company provides near-instant access to Labor-on-Demand that is always-on and massively scalable.

Product: CrowdFlower is a trusted service for processing high quality, high volumes of short, repetitive tasks that are difficult to automate . . . at awesome low costs.  Statistical quality control technology finally makes cloud labor a sustainable business reality through accuracy guarantees and efficient use of workers who moderate millions of tasks.  Many of these tasks are difficult to automate because they require human judgment, assessment of sentiment, interpretation of emotion, or involve unstructured data better suited for humans to organize.

Examples of common tasks processed by CrowdFlower include validating large databases that may be out of date or that involve information that regularly changes, updating or augmenting directory listings, evaluating images and content for copyright or trademark infringement, tagging and categorizing images and other types of content, and much more. The cost, volumes, and quality are impressive, but the most impressive aspect of this business is the way CrowdFlower users are building completely new revenue streams and competitive advantage with creative applications of this new cloud resource.  The company is venture backed and headquartered in San Francisco.

CodeBaby®

Customer Experience Goes Online. More often than not, the most powerful customer connections happen in the context of a conversation. That’s why customer relationship skills are among the most valued in business. Whether for marketing, sales, or service, an effective conversation between a customer and an employee has three key qualities: it’s highly interactive; it’s personally engaging; and it’s emotionally intelligent ... combining the subtle interplay between “heart and head”.

Today, customers are taking up residence online. As a result, a company’s website is the dominant mechanism for interacting with customers. Therein lies a significant challenge, because the web is effectively “emotionally challenged” -- lots of text, lots of pages, lots of clicks -- but no means for making a more human, “conversational style” connection with online customers.

What We Do.  That’s where CodeBaby® steps in. We’re a game-changing, category-making company that’s changing the face of the Web. Our solution is a fully animated, expressive digital character (a CodeBaby) that engages customers at key points in the online experience. We focus the CodeBaby Conversation at points of predictable emotional escalation. These are points where customers are more receptive, but also “moments of truth” where the customer relationship is at stake. We focus the CodeBaby Conversation on optimizing measurable customer objectives that include: lead capture; cross-sell/up-sell; click-to-buy optimization; complex web tasks; web navigation; customer support; and so on.

With our clients, we apply a simple guiding principle ... if you had a customer professional sitting next to your customer at a specific point in the online experience, what would you have them say, and what would you have them do? That’s what we do with the CodeBaby Conversation, but with some additional techniques and intelligence applied given the digital nature of our presence. Simply put, we sell the value of highly interactive, personally engaging, emotionally intelligent conversations for the online customer experience.

Why It Works.  Turns out, these online Conversations are astoundingly effective. But how does it actually work? Based on new discoveries over the last 10 years in neuroscience and psychology, we know we humans make our best decisions and move to action when there is a subtle interplay between rational thought, emotion, feeling, and intuition. Increasingly the disciplines of customer experience is coming to understand the importance of taking a whole mind, whole human approach to optimizing customer interactions. Additionally, we see a growing body of research and insight into the effectiveness of digital characters in making this “human” connection. Much of the early research centered on computer gaming. But increasingly, research is focusing on the effect of avatars and digital characters to drive commercial customer behaviors online. At CodeBaby, we are applying and building on these emerging insights into digital character / human interactions to insure maximum benefit in our solution. Of course, we can provide details on this recent research and publishing, as well as how we are leveraging these relationships and insights. We can also explain how we’re building a substantial Intellectual Property portfolio that includes invented technology and software engineering, Trade Secrets, Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights.

Patrick Bultema, CEO, CodeBaby

Patrick is a recognized industry leader and company maker. He has served as executive, investor, board member, and advisor to many venture-financed startups. Most recently, he was a Venture Partner with vSpring Capital. He also served as CEO of XAware and FrontRange Solutions, a global CRM software company. He was founder
and Executive Chairman of Knowlix, as well as Chairman/General Manager of the Help Desk Institute, then a Ziff-Davis company.

A noted author and speaker, Patrick is recognized as a leading expert in the customer management industry, and was previously founding Executive Editor of Customer Support Management Magazine. Patrick holds a Bachelorʼs degree from California State University and a Masterʼs from Princeton.

Concerity Analytics allows independent software vendors (ISVs) to gather key data on how their software products are used in the field by end users: either in a test environment or in production. Such business intelligence makes it possible for software companies to:
 

• make better product roadmap decisions,
• understand beta tester usage,
• gather sales intelligence,
• improve the ROI for engineering teams,
• and more.

 
For SaaS application providers, Concerity offers a web API that makes configuring and capturing key customer easy and quick.
According to Matt Cupal, Concerity President and CEO, initial implementation of Concerity Analytics can be as simple as embedding one line of new code into a new or existing software application.
 
“We’ve designed Concerity Analytics to be as simple as possible to use,” Cupal said. “Within a matter of minutes, companies can have a developer insert the single line of software code that calls the Concerity run time engine. From there, technical or non-technical managers can track any element of the user interface they wish. We then provide a host of tools to help software companies improve their product quality and fit to customer need. We call this ‘software relevance.’”
 
“Too many software companies rely too heavily on guesswork to drive their product decisions. There’s a better way.” Cupal said. “We created Concerity Analytics to help companies transform from being guess driven and hoping they’re right to being data driven and having confidence their software is on target. That’s why we say: ‘Stop guessing. Get Concerity.’”
 
 “We're deploying Concerity Analytics for our internal applications, as well as recommending it to our customers,” said James Stone, CEO of Aculis. “Aculis is a leading provider of outsource QA software testing and we have our own internal applications. We see this as a great tool to help our customer see how we’re doing on testing, as well as extending our suite of tests to the eventual end users of their applications. I’m looking forward to working closely with Concerity to implement Concerity Analytics into each of our applications.”
 
Concerity Analytics provides software companies (and in-house software teams) with the ability to:
 

• Measure and optimize feature usage,
• Understand beta tester behavior,
• Track, understand and improve product quality,
•  Prioritize product development efforts,
• Track and validate marketing programs (including conversion strategies for “trialware”),
• Proactively determine where support needs are highest and thus lower support costs,
•  Increase engineering ROI (Return on Investment), and
• Outmaneuver the competition through faster, smarter and more effective use of resources.

 
A public beta of Concerity Analytics is available for free download now and will remain free until February 28, 2010 when the company will unveil a full-featured paid version.
 
About Concerity, Inc.
Based in Salt Lake City, Concerity, Inc. was formed in 2009. Its first product, Concerity Analytics, helps software companies track actual customer usage of applications to help them identify and determine the most relevant features, functions and benefits of their software packages, increasing efficiency, ROI and profitability in the process. For more information, visit www.concerity.com.
 

 Collaboration apps and platform by Salesforce
 

Salesforce Chatter will completely transform the way you collaborate with the people in your company.  You'll know more about what matters to you and discover new information in the Chatter real-time feed. And all of it will fuel better—and faster—business decisions.

The Collaboration Cloud

Imagine if your company had its own private social networking site. Say hello to Chatter, a whole new world of business collaboration: We call it the Collaboration Cloud. With Chatter, you'll stay on top of everything that's happening in your company with real-time updates on people, groups, documents, and your application data. You'll find experts and discover new information in the Chatter real-time feed. And all of it will fuel better—and faster—business decisions.

Chatter social platform

With the new Chatter social platform, social features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform. Your custom apps will generate real-time feed updates, incorporate user profiles, and encourage dynamic interactions between people and groups. Soon salesforce.com customers, partners, and developers building custom applications will have all the social capabilities of Chatter at their disposal.

Salesforce.com is the enterprice cloud-computing company.  Known for the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud, our applications for sales and customer service (CRM); and Force.com our cloud platform for building and running business applications.