How do you define good service management software?

The results of the Metrix customer survey gives insight into the service management software industry.
If there’s one thing Metrix knows well, it’s creating software specifically for the service management industry. And, if there’s one thing our customers know well, it’s using our software to accomplish their specific business goals. When you put this knowledge together, there’s no limit to what we can do.

This is why Metrix recently surveyed our installed customer-base. Our goal was to find out the good, and yes, even the bad about our software. We plan to use this information to continually improve upon our software and our company. Below you’ll find a summary of what our customers had to say about service management software, Metrix and our competitors.

WHAT’S MAKES GREAT SERVICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE?
One of the survey questions was regarding what service management software attributes customers felt were most important. Although a majority of respondents listed most of the attributes as high on their lists, there were a few big winners. For example, a whopping 95 percent of survey respondents stated that the ability to customize and expand software was at the top of their list. In addition, other big winners included the 93 percent that said customer service was important and the 90 percent that said depth of features was important.

WHY IS METRIX BETTER?
Hoping to correlate well with the above statements, we asked our customers what makes Metrix software better than our competitors. At the top of the list was features/functionality and flexibility. Following close behind was Metrix’s customer support. Much to our delight, we did correlate well with what our customers felt were the most important attributes of service management software.

Many of the responses mentioned the robust functionality included in the Metrix 4e suite of products. Specific examples mentioned included the ability to capture service detail and history, repair center functionality and work flow rules.

In addition to these, the flexibility of our open architecture was mentioned several times. Examples of this include the ability to customize the application, configure business rules and the application’s overall ease of management.

METRIX VS. OUR COMPETITORS
As any good company should, Metrix always tries to top our competitors. We asked our customers if we were doing a good job verses our competitors and their responses are as follows. The two top areas where Metrix outshined our competitors were customer service and software features. 59 percent of respondents stated that Metrix customer service was “much better” or “better” than our competitors, and 48 percent said that our software features were “much better” or “better”.

These results aren’t too surprising since Metrix has been developing software specifically for the service industry for the past 25 years. This gives us a high-level of industry knowledge that just can’t be matched by most of our competitors.

Since the folks in the customer support department have been with Metrix for an average of 10 years or more, our high rating on customer service was no surprise. These employees really know their stuff and they pass their knowledge along to our customers. Also, when customers call during our regular business hours, they’ll always talk to a live human being - which is a nice break from getting stuck in the automated phone trees that most companies use.

WHAT WE CAN DO BETTER
As the old saying goes, “there’s always room for improvement”. The respondents to our customer survey let us know exactly what they’d like to see improved or added to our software, and we’re glad they did. The questions that related to this were open-ended, and there were too many results to list here. However, Metrix has been reviewing the feature requests and suggestions for possible inclusion into the next versions of our software.

Knowing our customers and their wants and needs is important to Metrix. Looking toward the future, we hope to get even closer to our customers by listening to their wants and needs, and communicating with them through this eNewsletter as well as our new blog. It’s all part of our commitment to provide customers with not just a software product, but a value-added relationship.