Custom projects (at Socialbakers)
If you are a SaaS company you want to focus on your product(s). You want to invest all of your energy to make your product great and all your clients happy. But you can’t simply do everything your clients want, you can’t develop the product in 100% customizable way. And there always be that one (or more) big client that asks you for something extra or maybe for something your competitor has, and you don’t. And you don’t want (or even can’t afford) to lose this client! And it’s the time you start to think about custom work.
If you think it through making a custom project for just one client or even a product outside your main tool, it doesn’t seem like a good investment of time and energy. It’s not scalable and in a way doesn’t make sense. And still companies are doing that and businesswise you have to accept it to keep your main clients happy. And that is the time when “Professional services” come to the game in Socialbakers.
Professional services (PS) has various understanding in the different industries. For SaaS companies we should mainly differentiate between PS and Customer Success teams. For products with intuitive behave, there is no need to involve the PS team in every new deal. That’s the case also for Socialbakers. Our main product Suite is intuitive enough to start to use the basic parts without any special guidance. When it comes to more advanced usage of the Suite our Customer Success manager guides the client through their process of implementation.
And then some products are not so easy to use or require more customization for individuals. In that case the PS team must be an essential part of your organization. It requires some level of subject expertise. Good examples could be any advanced CRM or Customer Support tools.
At Socialbakers, we don’t need Professional services in a sense of better configuration of our tool nor onboarding the clients. PS team focuses on Custom projects outside our main tool, to make our clients happy. But it serves always as a supplement to Socialbakers Suite. We look at the use-case and decide individually client by client. The purpose of the custom project shouldn’t be to take your clients out of your main tool. But it should rather help them to get the best of the tool, to maximize the usage or overcome the feature specifically for the client. You should invest your time wisely but keep your clients happy at the same time. An example of a custom project we did in Socialbakers is a dashboard built for our client from the entertainment industry. They highly use our AI features like automated sentiment and automated rule-based labeling of their posts from multiple social platforms. But they need to display and compare the data in a very specific way that other clients will hardly reuse. To use the dashboard in an effective way the client needs to make sure all data are set up in their Suite account. The dashboard makes the client happy to use our main tool.
If you are considering starting with custom projects, there are a couple of things you may want to take into consideration.
· Custom projects increase the retention of your clients. You do something extra for them that they can hardly get elsewhere. It improves relationships with your clients showing you care about their needs. This is important for the SaaS companies, from its nature it’s easier to switch the tool year after the year.
· Custom projects can overcome missing features to keep a big client.
· On the other hand you need to invest your time and effort wisely. Consider the use-case and business justification. The custom project should never substitute your main tool.
· You need to have a strong team behind your back when it comes to custom projects. Starting from an account manager that must understand the special request, to the development team, that performs an analysis and suggest a possible solution. As well as at least one (or more) dedicated developer to perform the maintenance.
· PS team should cooperate with other departments in the company. Mainly with the Product team to bring to their attention the needs of clients.
I hope this shed some light on custom projects and how we approach them in Socialbakers. If you want please let me know how you do your custom projects.
Do you want to learn more about how we work at Socialbakers? You can start with an article from our VP of Product here or reach me directly.
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