“Please contact support.” Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? At Newton we encourage people to contact support—by email or phone. No, I’m not kidding.
We call it “Support Driven Design”. I’ll explain this concept in just a bit, but first I’d like to give you some background on how we came to believe that free technical support results in better recruiting software: it makes it easier to use, faster to deploy, and paradoxically, makes supporting your customers cost less (which in our case means we can sell our hiring software for less money).
In the beginning providing free technical support, like we do at Newton, appeared to be purely a business decision: giving away support makes the buying decision easier for people. We also didn’t have the time to build a big FAQ on our site, so we were pretty much required to do this personally anyway. On top of this, we also don’t like paying for support, or reading online help, and felt that we shouldn’t make our clients do something we don’t like to do. Today we think it was a good business decision, and an even better product one.
Of course we were warned. The “old-school” software folks, whose advice we openly take and whose success we jealously admire, told us that providing free technical support was a bad idea. “You’re going to have to charge for it sooner or later because it will eat your margins,” “support is a profit center,” they’d say. We’ve always had a problem with authority…
Design the Question Out of the System
One of the first things we tell any customer at Newton is, “If you don’t understand something, no matter how small, it’s our fault, not yours. Let us know.” We ENCOURAGE technical support emails and phone calls. Again yes, I am being serious.
As a result, and contrary to what you might think, we are hardly ever asked to provide support. The net result of Support Driven Design has been that today we get less than 1 support question per year per customer, or about .01 questions for each user per year, a group of business users can be trained in 5 minutes, and a recruiter in a mind-numbing 30.
In the beginning, and still today, our product managers, i.e. the people responsible for designing Newton’s applicant tracking software, did all the walkthroughs, customer training, and provided all support. Without knowing it, we had started a “Support Driven” design shop. When we’d get a question from someone, we didn’t add it to the user manual, we’d think about how we could redesign Newton in such a way so that we didn’t have to answer the question again.
I think this has been more than a modest breakthrough for us. Instead of teaching people how to conform to our recruiting software, instead of an online hiring FAQ, we take each question and “design the question out of the system”.
For example, early on we had this bad “More Info” button that people overlooked. Since all support email came through my desk, as it does today, I answered the same question three times in one week, “Where do I find this <something>?” One of our customers actually apologized for asking me a “silly question”! Have we come this far? Do software users really think that it’s their fault for not understanding something? Clearly, it didn’t look like a button, and clearly it was our fault. That week spelled the end of that button. Support questions: 0. Easier to use: 1.
The Tail Wags the Dog
Since we’ve never charged for support we’ve learned to appreciate that if we design a confusing feature we’re going to pay for it later. Since we don’t force people to an FAQ page, we know immediately when something isn’t working. The tail of support wags the dog of design: if you can’t charge for it, you better make it work right out of the box.
As a result, we often design a feature and say to ourselves, “we can’t do this, it will create support tickets.” This approach is not for everyone (especially for companies that get paid for making confusing software). It puts tremendous strain on our design process, and is the single greatest reason why it takes us 4 times longer to design (i.e. mockup, whiteboard, wireframe, etc.) a new feature than it does for our development team to build it.
The output of this also means that we can provide free training. We don’t like losing money any more than anyone else and if it took us 4 hours to train our customers, or 40 emails to answer their questions, we’d never be profitable. Free support: design the question out of the system + design rigor = easy training.
Maybe paid support is why one of the more common questions asked in an RFP is if we have an online FAQ. Think about that. Buyers are actually asking if you have a way NOT to help them. Our answer is simple, “just call us.” You might counter with, “well, I would like to just figure it out myself, without contacting support.” Tail wags the dog: you need an FAQ because the software is confusing, it is confusing because instead of designing your question out of the software, it was built into a support guide.
I think it is worth noting that people aren’t accustomed to this business model. People actually apologize for “bothering me”. One of the things we try hard for at Newton is to change this behavior, to “re-train” people (in 5 minutes or less, 30 minutes for recruiters <wink>) into believing that we aren’t doing them a favor for answering their questions, they’re doing us a favor by asking one. I think it speaks to just how far software has moved away from the user, and how far it has yet to go towards providing real productivity.
So the net result is that free support has led to less support. Like I mentioned before, we get about 1 support email per year, per client. I can’t imagine that Newton will ever have a technical support department that’s not run by our design team. Unfortunately, it’s gotten rather lonely over here in the support department. Can someone please contact support? Have I mentioned it’s free?
We just made it faster and easier to analyze your recruiting program using Newton. Now you’ll see a tab on your home page called “Analytics” replacing the “Overview” tab. Click the Analytics tab to open a an interactive dashboard that will help you slice and dice you recruiting program. You can analyze your recruiting data based on a selected period of time or by job, or both.
This release, v3.6, is the first of several planned releases to tackle analytics. With a focus on measuring stage-to-stage metrics, we wanted to help our customers answer fundamental questions.
Where do I have bottlenecks?
Where can I get involved to make an immediate impact?
Is everyone in the process doing their part?
Am I spending money on the right resources?
Most importantly, we want to give our customers the power to know when something is going wrong before anyone else notices -to be proactive. After all, as John, our product manager, says, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
“You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’”
Bob Dylan
The Fishbowl
A couple of weeks ago I learned that my co-workers call the office that I share with our CEO, “The Fishbowl”. The Fishbowl is the nerve center of Newton Software. Given our small footprint, the Fishbowl acts as the design studio, front office, communications center and test lab. Sometimes our co-workers might say it more resembles an ultimate fighting iron cage, or a badger den, but for now we’ll leave it at The Fishbowl.
A while back, I started keeping a tally on my whiteboard in The Fishbowl. Often, during phone calls, I will get up and place a mark or two under some jibber that I had previously written. Over the last 2 quarters, my scrawl has roughly tripled in size, now infecting a second large grease-board. It now is directly juxtaposed with a neatly-written product roadmap owned by my office mate. Admittedly, the walls in our office now have a pop culture “Odd Couple” look to it.
As the VP of Marketing and Sales and general front-man for Newton Software, I spend a great majority of my time speaking with HR and corporate staffing professionals about recruiting and hiring. I also have the pleasure of spitballing with notable recruiting bloggers, industry analysts and other technology vendors in the recruiting-sphere.
Undeniably, the recent economic train wreck has brought a new sobriety to town and with it some pervasive emerging themes. And while I don’t profess to be a recruiting software industry Nostradamus, I can share with you some recent observations from my varied conversations over the past 2 quarters. Clearly, there is shift occurring and believe it or not, this shift means good things are ahead for people that buy (recruiting) software.
Here are the trends that I believe are here to stay even when, once again, the economy improves and hiring becomes a front-burner issue.
My 3 Emerging Trends:
1. Easy Does It.
I would have called this trend, “a return to simplicity”, but as far as I can tell, recruiting software has never really known simplicity. 90% of the people that I speak with are looking for a “simple and easy” system that offers them the capabilities to improve the process of recruiting, without headaches.
I believe that this quest for easy and simple is a reaction to stress created by people being asked to do more with less. No one that I speak with has time for complexity right now. They don’t have time to learn, tweak and teach others another new system. They’ve got a lot of other things on their plate, and they can’t relearn a software application when hiring is turning on and off every few months (or weeks).
For example, I spoke with an HR manager named Patty the other day who is basically doing 3 jobs. “I am the office manager, HR manager, and recruiting coordinator. Right now I am getting hundreds of resumes a week that I need to open, make sure they are not duplicates and then forward to the managers. All I need to know is if your system can help me get some control and save me time somewhere?” I hear things like this all of the time, and everyone asks for the same thing, “Will I be able to use it, tomorrow?”
Obviously the movement away from complexity and toward simplicity has been going on for some time, well before the recession. But the recession has really made us all focus on what makes us, and our businesses, more efficient. It’s kind of like stubbing your toe. The first time you stub your toe, it hurts. The second time it hurts 10 times more. The economic meltdown was the first stub, and anything that makes us inefficient or slows us down from here is likely to bring us to our knees. In these tough times software vendors should be listening to their customers and innovating. In the end, this will be good for the software industry as a whole.
2. I Need this to Work, Now.
In 2007, when we started offering beta versions of Newton®, “deep customization” was high on our customers’ lists of requirements. In the past year, this request has become nearly non-existent.
Now this is entirely contrary to a recent poll on ATS (applicant tracking systems) I read, so I should explain. I would like to call it a little bit of the “tail wagging the dog”. If you sell software without a good recruiting process built in, then you MUST make it deeply customizable. If you’re a software company without HR people and recruiters guiding your product design, then it MUST be customizable, because you don’t know the challenges faced by your audience (your customers).
Most buyers that I speak with are being asked to spend less on sourcing, recruiting agencies and to cut advertising budgets, while still providing service to multiple teams that demand fast service. Clearly, the “here’s a tool, now build your own” approach won’t work for them. I believe that this trend is characterized by buyers seeking software that helps them do their job better, instead of software tools that they must “teach” how to solve their problems. “We need to fill these before we lose budget,” is a common refrain. These buyers I talk to don’t have time to wait for long customization process: they have a couple of openings, and they need them filled fast. Instead of a hammer, they need a house.
I get this a lot; “Let me be honest, we don’t have much of a recruiting process.” In some companies, the people that used to own and drive recruiting aren’t there anymore (often due to budget cuts). And, truth be told, there are many companies that have never had much of a recruiting process to speak of. People from these camps are looking for best-of-breed software that already has a powerful process built-in. “Our core competency is making renewable energy accessible, not recruiting. I just need something that works,” remarked an operations manager during a recent meeting. Custom software for these companies is like a birthday present without the batteries.
I would like to add that I don’t just see this shift in recruiting software, either. Just the other day one of our customers asked if we could recommend “Newton-like” performance review software. She wanted something that “would just solve the problem so that I don’t have to build this process myself.” More and more, software vendors are building innovative “point solutions” to optimize business processes providing more options and ultimately better software for consumers. It’s about time.
3. Come On! Make it cost less and take the handcuffs off. I am a customer.
Captain Obvious at your service: The recent financial meltdown has put an emphasis on thriftiness. All enterprises, even oil companies, are looking for ways to shave costs. Buyers that I speak with have no choice; they are short-staffed, under-budgeted and forced to do more with less in the most uncertain conditions of their lives.
So what’s the trend? Economizing? That’s part of it and very well could be the biggest driving force. But, what I find really interesting is that some software companies are structuring their businesses to entice cost-conscious buyers. And, potentially even more interesting is how this trend may turn the business of enterprise software on its ear.
Many progressive software companies, across all industries, are offering “Friction-Free” buying programs to attract and retain customers. These programs are highlighted by simple tiered-pricing models, free trial periods, pay-as-you-go-contracts and non-punitive cancelation policies. The reduced risks help buyers get purchases approved easily.
(As a side note, this new model for software pricing forces vendors to build better software because they don’t force people into long term contracts: if the software isn’t good, you cancel.)
Convoluted pricing hides the elephant in the closet behind long-term contracts. “With our current software every time I want to do something, like add a user, or increase our job limit I’m forced to call someone and pay a fee.” Or, “We tried to lower our user limit because we aren’t hiring as much, but they wouldn’t let us. When our term expires we’re going to cancel.” I hear these complaints almost every day, and the recession will be the end of this: the elephant has charged and is bowling over these anti-customer business models. Fair pricing is coming, for some buyers it has arrived, and it will benefit all consumers long after the recession is over.
Walk the Walk
As you can imagine, most trends are interconnected. Fatigued by complicated products, failed implementations and archaic pricing methods, buyers of recruiting software are seeking innovative products delivered with dynamic terms of service. I speak with at least 10 companies a week that are looking to move away from their legacy recruiting software and I can only guess that this will accelerate as the economy improves. With better access to information and the creation of easy-to-use products offered with friction-free buying programs, consumers are more empowered than ever to shift allegiances from one vendor to another. And with modern systems, companies can easily move information from one system to another without incurring significant IT headaches and extended service outages.
Undoubtedly, the way business software is designed and delivered is changing and it must continue to change to satisfy the evolving demands of buyers. Recruiting software vendors will need to examine how they develop and deliver their wares. And this brings me to why the recession will end up being good for you, the buyers of software. When it comes time to start buying again, you’ll for the first time have better choices: ease of use, built in intelligence, and fair pricing.
Newton Software has debuted the Newton® Affiliate Program, a third-party sales program for its smart, easy-to-use, recruiting technology, Newton®. The program allows qualified individuals to refer Newton® to friends, contacts, and companies and earn a percentage of the revenue generated from each sale. Ideal affiliate partners include agency recruiters, contract recruiters, human resources consultants, and other service providers.
Interested parties can sign up for the program on the Newton Software website. Approved affiliates will receive a unique code via email. Approved Newton® affiliates can then distribute their code to interested parties. When a company becomes a paying customer of Newton® the referring affiliate will earn a commission.
“There is quite a demand for this type of affiliate program in the professional recruiting communities where Newton® is quickly gaining momentum. Many contract recruiters have expressed interest in recommending Newton® to their clients and now we can easily empower them to do so,” said Steve Hazelton, Newton’s® CEO and Chief Product Officer. “With the Newton® Affiliate Program, our partners can provide more complete, effective recruiting services to their clients while generating a little additional income.”
Jeff Winter, General Manager of GravityPeople, Silicon Valley’s most established technology recruiting firm became the first affiliate partner 4 months ago during a beta test of the program. “The Newton® Affiliate Program has given our team the ability to recommend easy-to-use, affordable software to our clients. Having been in technology recruiting for nearly 12 years, we have seen plenty of ATS software applications and nothing compares to Newton’s intuitiveness. Newton keeps our clients organized and generally improves the recruiting process allowing my team to focus on identifying and managing talent, not chasing hiring mangers around.”
Jonathan Chenard, Practice Manager at Union Hill, a recruiting consultancy, said, “The Newton Affiliate Program has been a great opportunity for my firm to extend the services we provide to our clients. As a recruitment consulting firm, we have been actively providing both support and training for Newton software. Now, through our affiliate code, we offer our clients a convenient and efficient way to purchase Newton. ”
“We want to apply Newton’s key values of innovation, collaboration and ease-of-use to the entire business ecosystem. We have an innovative business model that enables us to create unique programs that provide value to our partners and customers,” said Joel Passen, Newton Software’s Co-Founder. “Our best advocates are those that have used Newton on a daily basis. Referring Newton is the ultimate compliment and we want to provide as much incentive our community as much as possible.”
Companies and individuals that would like to participate in the Newton® Affiliate Program can simply visit the affiliate website (http://www.newtonsoftware.com/affiliate-program.php) and fill out a short application. Approved affiliates will receive a unique affiliate code typically within 24 hours.
About Newton®
Newton® is web-based recruiting software that uses smart technology to simplify hiring. Newton® offers the quickest and easiest way for small and medium sized businesses to organize and manage recruiting. Newton® is a native SaaS application that leverages Web 2.0 technology to empower companies of any size to create an efficient and effective recruiting process, which boosts productivity and lowers costs associated with hiring.
About Newton Software
Newton Software develops and markets smart, easy-to-use, web-based technology for small and medium sized businesses. By offering, free trials, pay-as-you-go contracts, and all inclusive purchase plans Newton software is breaking new ground in the way business technology is designed and delivered.
We recently made some modifications to our website. Not only had we outgrown our first website but we also landed the domain name that we wanted when we started the company—Newton Software.
A light bulb went off during this process—whenever we go to a website, whether we are buying a bike tire or software, we all always want to know how much things cost. We’re pretty sure that you agree with the statement, “Just show us the price!” We hate it when people don’t tell us the price. Why were we doing the same?
The Art of Pricing: According to Dilbert
So to avoid the all too common example told by this Dilbert cartoon, we have published pricing on our website for anyone to see (http://www.newtonsoftware.com/pricing.html).
Obviously, publishing pricing information is considered anathema to conventional business software companies.
The paradox of hiding your price is that it actually makes your software more expensive: hiding your price means you must employ salespeople to sell your software. Therefore, you must charge more for your product to pay their salaries and to provide them the opportunity to earn commissions. This is turn causes the loathsome cat and mouse game that most us have experienced when investigating software; ask for a little information, get stalked by a salesperson. For the record, we don’t have any sales people at Newton Software. We keep our footprint small and our overhead low so we can focus on developing smart technology.
There is, of course, some downside to publishing price on our site. We can’t do all of those annoying things that other software companies can do, like charging one customer more than another, tricking people into long-term contracts and charging for everything under the sun(like adding users, adding forms, implementation and activation).
The other day, I was speaking with a customer of a well known payroll company that happens to sell recruiting software. This person recently hired a recruiter to replace someone that was unfortunately laid-off late last year. She needed to get her new hire “on the system”. So, she called her support number and was transferred to the sales department. The sales department promptly explained that there is a charge for changing users. So, how did she react? Well, there was not much she could do. Buried in her 21 page contract, in section Y, article (ii) there states a clause that “adding and/ or changing a user will incur an activation cost outlined in addendum B of said contract”. She had to pay the $550 dollars for someone to flip a switch and type 10 characters on a keyboard. We think this is crazy.
So what is our thinking on publishing our price on our website? Well, as I mentioned earlier; if we were visiting our own website, we would want to know how much Newton costs and how the pricing works. We want you to get as much information as possible from our website about both the product and whether or not it fits into your budget. And, we want you to be able to do this on your terms without pushy, commission-driven sales people hounding you incessantly because they have a quota to meet.
We believe that part of the reason that people put-off buying technology that could make their lives easier is because the purchasing process is so mind-numbingly painful—rife with complicated pricing formulas, too many options, long commitments, long implementations cycles ( we’ll address that is a future post), and pushy sales reps.
We design smart, easy-to-use software that takes the friction out of hiring. We want the way that we price our product to take the friction out of buying it. Tell people what they get, don’t charge for things that should be included like activation and implementation and provide plans that appeal to a broad spectrum of companies—no brainer. We think of this stuff so you don’t have to.
“Please contact support.” Makes you cringe, doesn’t it? At Newton we encourage people to contact support—by email or phone. No, I’m not kidding.
