In an industry where high customer churn – or high customer turnover – is accepted by many SaaS executives as a standard cost of doing business, best of breed cloud providers continue to push for annual customer retention rates that exceed 95-percent.
Breaking from Industry Norms
Considering that industry standards generally regard 93-95% SaaS customer retention to be a solid rate of retention, according to an article at SixteenVentures.com, it is fair to say SaaS and IaaS providers that are pushing that number up beyond 97% are best of breed providers, both from a performance standpoint and a customer service standpoint.
However, many cloud providers consider 90% customer retention to be an acceptable number and never push to exceed market standards.
“…no customer is truly loyal in the cloud,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP at Nucleus Research in a recent statement, “requiring vendors to step up their sales discipline and allocate additional focus of their attention to providing excellent service to new customers and those approaching the period of re-evaluation of their existing cloud CRM solutions.”
While the Nucleus Research article’s statement is not untrue, best of breed ERP cloud and CRM cloud providers want to go beyond accepted norms. Aiming to push beyond market standards of customer loyalty, these providers often take a human approach to cloud customer service and provide the necessary post-sale service and long term support around customer compliance.
RoseASP delivers audit-ready IaaS and SaaS Dynamics cloud services for Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL and CRM. We finished the 2015 calendar year with a 97.5% customer retention rate, a 0.1% improvement over the previous year. We attribute our continuously high customer loyalty to our service-first approach to cloud and our unmatched ability to deliver audit-ready cloud accounting environments for highly regulated businesses. You can learn more about how we maintain high levels of customer loyalty from this article.
The quality of post-sale service is an important differentiator between the best of breed cloud ERP companies, and those cloud providers with higher customer churn rates. Continued service after the sale with 24/7/365 support for any connectivity, backup, restore, password reset or other application readiness issues is critical to a successful ERP cloud deployment; it is an absolute necessity for publicly traded companies or businesses in heavily regulated industries. If you are curious about the various compliance concerns for ERP cloud, see this Microsoft Dynamics Cloud Security and Compliance page.
While compliance requirements often coincide with security requirements, compliance is also about data integrity and reporting. A cloud provider’s policies, procedures and traceability must be compliance validated and well documented to continually retain highly regulated clients. To truly meet the long-term compliance needs of their customers, cloud providers must also help reduce the risk and cost of compliance by streamlining customers’ auditing and reporting processes.
You may be interested in this SOX and HIPAA Cloud Story »Long gone are the days when a business could get by with aging systems or reporting and accounting procedures that create a bottle neck every period close. The technology needs of enterprises are changing rapidly, and not keeping up means losing a competitive advantage. For this reason, cloud providers must be constantly innovating and they must deliver applications that meet the current demands of corporate IT with the flexibility to adapt as those demands change.
So choosing a cloud provider with a reputation of high customer retention means your business is more likely to see long term ROI, considering the hoster like has a proven ability to adapt and work closely with you and your ERP Partners to deliver state-of-the-art accounting apps.
Check out this video to learn more about delivering audit-ready Dynamics IaaS and SaaS for SOX:
What’s Next..?
Learn more about what to expect from an Audit-ready ERP cloud provider’s Service Level Agreement:
Everything you need to know about Cloud Service Level Agreements for Compliant Cloud Hosting.
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