MatsSoft: focus on service for future success – Martin Scovell and Andy Hendry

Businesses everywhere experienced huge challenges in maintaining customer relationships during the economic recession and continue to do so. While companies had to cut costs and improve their operating efficiencies, for many this resulted in risk to the customer experience and undercutting client loyalty - a crucial factor for future success.

As companies emerge from the recession, many are rebuilding these bridges and delivering a more efficient and customer-focused offering to reconnect with their clients.

According to the American Express '2011 Global Customer Service Barometer', in a positive economy more than half of consumers across all markets are happy to spend more with a company that they believe provides excellent service, while significantly more consumers in India (90%, Mexico (79%) and Australia (73%) said they were willing to do so. Additionally, more than half said they would try a new brand or organisation to get a better experience.

"The relationship with the customer is more important than ever," says Martin Scovell, CEO of MatsSoft, a UK-based software company that provides web-based workflow and communications solutions. "Competition is on the increase and enterprises need to deliver a better service. Companies need to better manage their clients' expectations; if they do that, complaints will drop, customers will recommend them to friends and family, and they'll spend more."

Providing excellent customer service while increasing efficiencies is the holy grail for many firms. Scovell explains that customer satisfaction is synonymous with organisations using solutions that make their business more efficient.

"Ultimately, great customer experience starts from getting your processes right, because that gives you the framework and outputs to deliver a consistent, coherent and proactive set of communications," he says. "This manages the customer's behaviour and expectations, empowers them and ultimately delivers a better customer experience."

Inspirational software solutions

MatsSoft started operating in 2007 and has major clients in the financial services arena - including half of the top ten UK banks - as well as in the telecoms, pharmaceuticals, corporate and government sectors.

"Our suite covers communications, workflow, and management information and reporting," says Scovell. "There aren't many other solutions that actually join all those together in one unified platform. Our MATS® solutions are very sophisticated and cohesive. MATS is a managed software as a service (SaaS), which means we can push it into a business quickly and cost-effectively, so that companies can see immediate benefits."

The need for more flexible and simpler software solutions that are able to handle a range of customers, at affordable prices, inspired the need for SaaS. Research has revealed that organisations are increasingly embracing this model, and analysts at Gartner have predicted that by 2012, 20% of businesses will rely solely on SaaS solutions.

Industry specialists place emphasis on the financial downturn being the tipping point for companies' increased interest in SaaS. This is mainly down to strapped IT departments, as well as CEOs being less tolerant of projects with a return on investment of two to three years, as opposed to within one year, which this model can offer.

Challenging the big guys

Companies can now easily deploy new applications and avoid the traditional cost and maintenance associated with in-house platforms. Andy Hendry, CTO of MatsSoft, says that some of the company's benefits include an immediate and dramatic increase in productivity, reduced inbound and outbound telephone traffic by up to 65%, greatly reduced postal traffic and fewer customer complaints, often by as much as 90%, all of which means big cost reductions, too.

"We remove the need for going to one of the traditional major vendors by offering something that is effectively more powerful since it is more direct," Hendry says. "We can deploy our solution within four to six weeks, which is significantly faster than customers have previously expected. It doesn't matter what technology they have, we can work with it in parallel.

"We also don't impact on the customer's existing IT infrastructure, which is often a bottleneck for them. Another massive benefit is that we invariably deliver a very fast ROI, usually well within a year, and our real time management and reporting delivers all the evidence needed to prove this."

Despite well-documented evidence of the benefits of solutions like MATS, it still can be difficult to get large organisations to listen.

"The natural reaction is, 'nobody gets fired for buying IBM', which means that everyone is used to buying from a well-known firm and so they are less willing to go to smaller businesses," explains Scovell. "Sometimes it's in the DNA of organisations never to outsource to smaller providers. The new generation of senior executives that have actually experienced web-based solutions has seen and understands the benefits, and accepts that there are no added risks."

"It will become an increasingly competitive environment; vendors are exploring this growing sector," says Scovell. "Our challenge is to make sure our proposition remains leading-edge in terms of what it does technically and in terms of the tangible cost, operational and service benefits it immediately delivers. We're in a good place and the market is going to grow at a rapid pace."