4 Tips for Software Companies to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Business advice for firms in the software field is a lot different than for other businesses. Most important of the differences is software licensing and the technicalities around it when it comes to sales and development. Beyond the legalities there are so many other things that software companies have to be doing to improve their bottom line.

Improving profits means improving sales and improving the rate of your product by adding more value to the user according to market standards. Many developers focus too much on customer acquisition, rather than trying to build out from the customer base they already posses. Some try referral systems to incentivize users to share the app, but nothing is effective in generating brand awareness than good old genuinely satisfied users.

Now let’s look at four ways to make licensees genuinely happy.

1. Use Software Escrows

Developers are in a dilemma when it comes to the point whether they should be releasing their source code to all licensees or not. The problem with that is, most of the time when you give your source code to licensees indiscriminately, it ends up online somewhere resulting in 5-10 clones of your app.

What if in a worst-case scenario, your firm goes bankrupt? Many licensees would be concerned about it because they would want the app to continue working even when the developers couldn’t provide updates for whatever reason. It’s at times like these when a source code escrow can help you out.

2. Quickly Provide Responses

Many software firms promise a quick response time around 24 hours, and although that can be considered a decent response time, many software users wouldn’t like to wait until the next day to get an answer for the problem they are looking at. If you are hoping to set up an excellent customer service, then your aim should be around the 1-2 hours mark every time.

3. Setup a Forum

Customers like to chat with fellow users to discover new ways of using the app to their advantage and then to share techniques across, so a forum is a very good idea to create a community. Don’t consider it as a replacement for customer support, though you can provide support through forums as an added bonus, may be as an extended FAQ to avoid answering the same questions repeatedly.

4. Create on Feature Requests

Software grow and are developed further into new versions with each of their update. Make sure that you deliver on feature requests with every major update whenever it’s possible. Though it sounds like common sense, many developers overlook it. Of course, you can’t guarantee every recommendations as some might be absurd and not in sync with your vision for the project. Try to honor a good majority of the requests in a way that it satisfies your licensees and improves the overall functionality of the software as well.

Support Quality is as Important as the Software Itself

In the end, the friendliness, responsiveness, and usefulness of a company’s total support team will be a tremendously important factor in whether your users will stay with you, satisfied and in for the long-term or not. This is extremely true when you’re dealing with business licenses. You should always on the lookout for improving your customer experience, setting a software escrow is one such thought, that takes care of the welfare of the licensee to a large extent. I hope the article was useful to you, let us know your thoughts and views on the topic in the comments section and we would be glad to discuss on the same.