According to the adage “When one door closes, another one opens,” there are opportunities and unfulfilled customer needs even in this dour economic environment. Rather than hiding in a cave and waiting for the calamity to pass, some creative business software companies and individuals have been coming up with new value propositions to solve real problems for their customers.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, writing software applications is the easy part, relatively speaking. Making sure that one has a distinct solution to a problem that people are willing to pay for (especially nowadays when cash is scarce) is the hard part.
Generally speaking, the primary difference between good companies and great ones lies in their customer service. Inexpensive and easily deployable software applications that can help companies be more responsive to their customers and provide better service via showing “one face to the customer” (in turn due to much better internal communications) can go a long way even these days. The end result should typically be delighted existing customers, and, especially in this social networking era where news travels fast, happy customers (and their public product reviews and verdicts) should beget more customers.
In fact, some startup companies believe that this is an exciting time to be in the IT business. As established in my recent “SaaSy Discussions” series, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing are appealing business models for both vendors and customers, and will continue to be disruptive (game-changing) technologies for the foreseeable future.
But again, the delivery model is only part of the equation, whereas astute software applications that solve a specific problem are the key success factor (KSF).
Supporting Diverse Teams in the Cloud
Enter Muroc Systems, Inc., a Dallas, Texas, (US)-based software startup focusing on business applications delivered via the SaaS model. The company’s flagship product is TeamSupport.com, which is an on-demand customer service application that targets software companies.
Robert Johnson, chief executive officer (CEO) of Muroc Systems, previously ran a successful software company that served TV stations and broadcasting industries. He sold that company in 2006, and several people that shared his philosophies about how to run a software company and treat customers followed him to Muroc.
The startup company is self-funded at the moment, and has a focused team of fewer than 10 people. The majority of the team are software developers, with sales and marketing rounding out the rest of the Muroc team.
The idea behind TeamSupport.com came from a problem Johnson faced at his previous software company. Having recognized early on that customer service was crucial to the success and growth of his company, Johnson wanted to have his customer service group and the product development team working on the same software application (and thus constantly be “on the same page”) to track customer issues, software bugs, tasks, and new feature requests.
In his search for available solutions, Johnson found that there were some decent help desk applications for customer service advisors (agents) and bug-tracking applications for product developers, but there were no systems designed for both groups to use. For example, the well-known Bugzilla bug-tracking software is not aware of who the customer is.
After doing a thorough market search, the company was not able to find anything commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), so it ended up developing its own customer service software. After selling that company, Johnson had an epiphany that there was a market for better customer service software targeted towards independent software vendors (ISVs), and founded Muroc Systems to pursue that vision.
Muroc’s mission statement for TeamSupport.com is to create world-class customer service software for ISVs. As mentioned earlier, the entire TeamSupport.com team consists of veterans of other successful software companies, and they all believe that superior customer service is one of the factors that differentiates software companies. They also believe that customer service does not just come from the customer-facing service department, but rather from the entire company.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, writing software applications is the easy part, relatively speaking. Making sure that one has a distinct solution to a problem that people are willing to pay for (especially nowadays when cash is scarce) is the hard part.
Generally speaking, the primary difference between good companies and great ones lies in their customer service. Inexpensive and easily deployable software applications that can help companies be more responsive to their customers and provide better service via showing “one face to the customer” (in turn due to much better internal communications) can go a long way even these days. The end result should typically be delighted existing customers, and, especially in this social networking era where news travels fast, happy customers (and their public product reviews and verdicts) should beget more customers.
In fact, some startup companies believe that this is an exciting time to be in the IT business. As established in my recent “SaaSy Discussions” series, software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing are appealing business models for both vendors and customers, and will continue to be disruptive (game-changing) technologies for the foreseeable future.
But again, the delivery model is only part of the equation, whereas astute software applications that solve a specific problem are the key success factor (KSF).
Supporting Diverse Teams in the Cloud
Enter Muroc Systems, Inc., a Dallas, Texas, (US)-based software startup focusing on business applications delivered via the SaaS model. The company’s flagship product is TeamSupport.com, which is an on-demand customer service application that targets software companies.
Robert Johnson, chief executive officer (CEO) of Muroc Systems, previously ran a successful software company that served TV stations and broadcasting industries. He sold that company in 2006, and several people that shared his philosophies about how to run a software company and treat customers followed him to Muroc.
The startup company is self-funded at the moment, and has a focused team of fewer than 10 people. The majority of the team are software developers, with sales and marketing rounding out the rest of the Muroc team.
The idea behind TeamSupport.com came from a problem Johnson faced at his previous software company. Having recognized early on that customer service was crucial to the success and growth of his company, Johnson wanted to have his customer service group and the product development team working on the same software application (and thus constantly be “on the same page”) to track customer issues, software bugs, tasks, and new feature requests.
In his search for available solutions, Johnson found that there were some decent help desk applications for customer service advisors (agents) and bug-tracking applications for product developers, but there were no systems designed for both groups to use. For example, the well-known Bugzilla bug-tracking software is not aware of who the customer is.
After doing a thorough market search, the company was not able to find anything commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), so it ended up developing its own customer service software. After selling that company, Johnson had an epiphany that there was a market for better customer service software targeted towards independent software vendors (ISVs), and founded Muroc Systems to pursue that vision.
Muroc’s mission statement for TeamSupport.com is to create world-class customer service software for ISVs. As mentioned earlier, the entire TeamSupport.com team consists of veterans of other successful software companies, and they all believe that superior customer service is one of the factors that differentiates software companies. They also believe that customer service does not just come from the customer-facing service department, but rather from the entire company.
