Recently, I got a phone call from a potential customer, who said they were interested in using
LM-X License Manager to license their software product.
They had been using one of our competitor’s license management products some years ago, but then began partnering with another company on licensing issues and no longer needed license management software. Later, they wanted to break free from the partner they’d been working with, so they approached their previous license management software company again. Being a small company with only a few developers, they were understandably discouraged about getting a quote in the magnitude of tens of thousands USD.
Listening to this company’s needs, I saw that we would be completely capable of solving their technical requests. They didn't mind our initial purchase price either, which was several times lower than the competitor’s.
However, they expected that our software would include unlimited support at no additional cost, arguing that large companies like Autodesk offer a licensing model where maintenance is virtually free and covered by an up-front fee. I attempted to explain that continued development and support is expensive, because it's resource demanding and requires active time as opposed to selling a fixed package. But the company was so against paying for maintenance, they decided to write their own license manager.
Since I don't know exactly how Autodesk’s licensing model works, I can’t go into those details. However, the conversation got me thinking about what we as X-Formation want to achieve. After a few weeks of thinking, I concluded that what we feel is more important to our customers than
free support is
quality support.
We want to offer our products at very competitive prices
and with high quality support, and we work hard to accomplish this. The bottom line is that our products are sold at prices several times less than our higher-end competitor’s products. At the same time, we optimize our support resources to takes care of our customers’ requests much faster than our competitors do.
On a daily basis, our average support response time is about 1-6 hours during normal business hours. This goes for both small and large customers, because we value
all our customers.
Furthermore, bugs are usually identified within a few hours and typically solved within the same day if it's not a complicated problem. In some cases, we've acted so quickly that the customer reporting a problem didn't even have time to verify the solution until much later after receiving the solution.
Recently, we also introduced our
issue tracking system, which allows our customers to participate directly in our development. Yet another step we've made to increase the satisfaction of our existing client base as well as welcome new users to the X-Formation family. Actually, our users are better called partners, because they are the key resource for allowing us to create better software.
We recognize that frustrated users can be particularly helpful in improving our services.
I do not see negative feedback as bad. Rather, it encourages us to improve our services and increase the
value that we provide.
The feedback we’ve received has influenced us in introducing several offerings for our different markets. Here are a just a few of the offerings we did throughout 2007:
Discount for Samreport users
License management made affordable
LM-X License Manager for Free
Discounted Prices for License Statistics
To sum up, we prefer giving our customers real value over simply providing low-cost software that doesn’t deliver the functionality and level of support that customers need to get their jobs done. During the upcoming year we will continue to strive towards delivering more value.
