Selling the Experience
How SaaS is becoming UXaaS
Jacob Frackson — Front-End Dev + Blogger @ Nukern
With something like email or web hosting there are so many solutions that these industry are no longer about just software as a service, because, simply put, software isn’t enough to draw people in anymore. Because now you have to sell an experience.
Email has been done and redone so many times that it’s tempting to write the whole thing off and hunker down with your original AOL account. New services that claim to replace or improve email only seem to rehash one another, or at most offer a refreshing colour palette. Mailbox is based on swipes to deal with email, Google’s Inbox is based on the idea of sub-inboxes to deal with it, but both just recycle the concept of a single email coming in, being processed, and then archived — they just slightly retool the pathways.
With web hosting the landscape is very similar. Whether your site is hosted with GoDaddy, Namecheap, or a local hosting company, you’re probably receiving the same service, and for about the same price. And if you’re the host — especially if you’re the host! — it’s no different.
That’s because in both B2C and B2B markets there’s a bad case of SaaS stagnation going around. The software is built, the clientele is drawn in, and then it’s just left to sit. The users are there, the revenue is coming in, but then again, so are the support tickets — and by the hundreds! Clients get trapped by lame license deals and swampy support systems, and in the end, are left using crummy software.
But, every once in a while — kind of like what we’re seeing with Slack — a new software breaks the mold. Slack has made a reputation for itself where people would actually miss it if it weren’t there. Compared to most email clients or hosting services, this is incredible. If Mailbox were to go down today, how do you think most users would respond? Would they be mostly indifferent and easily just migrate to another service? Or, like with Slack, would more than half of users would be “very disappointed”?
Compared to the competition, Slack feels like it’s actually going somewhere, and going somewhere with a purpose. It’s increasing its integration points, it’s working with developers, and ultimately it feels like the people at Slack actually care about the user experience.
Similar examples are all around us, like Zendesk, Mailchimp, or CrazyEgg. Companies like these are no longer stopping at Software as a Service. Now they’re selling User Experience as a Service — and it’s making all the difference.
And here at Nukern, it’s no different. As a web designer or developer — or even as a professional web host — the software that’s currently available to you is pretty rigid. It does what it says it does — basic invoicing and server management — but beyond that it’s flat. These softwares infrequently offer new integrations, give little developer support, and are about as hip as IE8.
In opposition to that, we at Nukern are different. The software that we’re building will offer more features, more life, and more easter-eggs. Keep in touch, learn more about us, and help us in a journey to make a UXaaS business.
