Software as a Service (SaaS) has revolutionised our lives and freed most of us from large up-front development costs, expensive on-premise hardware and associated software and networks.

You just sign up and everything magically appears with your business data, pictures, documents. It is all backed up and safe. However, have you checked the provider is actually doing what they promised? AXLR8 have been in the SaaS business for over 2 decades and trust many suppliers but check everyone.

What questions should I ask an SaaS supplier?

Here are a few questions we suggest that you ask your SaaS supplier.

Business Stability

1. Do you track their published accounts every year? Remember, the pandemic has tested all companies and many SaaS companies may be running on empty. More companies go out of business coming out of a recessionary period than going in to it!
2. Are they debt free or do they have a negative balance sheet? If negative, is it getting worse year on year? Could the bank “pull the plug” tomorrow?
3. Is the Supplier financially stable? Remember, if they miss payments to a lender, any of their key staff or any of their hosting and technology suppliers, they could disappear overnight and your data and system will probably be lost!
4. Does the SaaS company have a portfolio of markets they work in so that a change in one market does not wipe them out overnight? Importantly, after the pandemic, are they already “running on empty”?
5. How long have they been in business? Is their business growing or, if it has been through some recessions and recovered competently, all the better!
6. Do they have many clients in their portfolio?
7. Do they have an expert stable team or is there staff turnover? Worst of all, is it a one or two person company which could disappear with the health or motivation of one person?

My business critical data

1. Do they answer their telephones in an emergency?
2. Can I get my data from my SaaS supplier (free or for a reasonable small labour and materials fee)?
3. Where can I read my contract for the service? If it was just something I clicked “OK” to when I signed up, then was there a clause to say they can change it at any time?
4. Do I own my data entirely or do the supplier feel they own it?
5. Does my supplier understand their responsibility as Data Processor and how it affects my liability under GDPR as the Data Controller?
6. Who decides access rights for my staff? What happens when staff join or leave?
7. If I am using the system free of charge, do the suppliers expect something back and if so, what?
8. If I am paying, what if I miss a payment? Is there a small or large admin penalty? When does all my data get deleted? No supplier can store it indefinitely due to GDPR DP liabilities. If they do not delete my data, what are they doing with it?
9. When can I give notice and what are the implications for recovering my data and any associated documents, mails, pictures, etc?
10. Is the SaaS supplier compliant with cyber security standards? For example, can you find them on the IASME Cyber Essentials Plus compliant companies?
11. Do your SaaS supplier have a reputable company for regular annual penetration testing to check security of the systems holding your (customer) data?
12. What are their security policies?
13. What are their privacy policies and can you find them on the Information Commissioner’s registration list?
14. Can I talk to someone – a real human being – about the technical or commercial issues that arise?
15. Can I customise and personalise the system and how does this affect my rights to upgrades?
16. How often do they actually do back ups? Nightly, hourly, weekly? Are back ups hot? In other words, if my server goes down, does another one come up immediately? These different levels of disaster readiness come with very different price tickets. What level of resilience do I need?
17. Can they scale with my business?
18. Will they offer training for super users of the system?

Build vs Buy: should we just develop our own in-house system?

Before developing your own system with a software developer or an in-house developer, you should also be able answer the above questions.

You will be aware of the well known economics of software development:

If it costs 1 pound to develop a system,

it costs 10 pounds to implement and another 10 pounds to document it

15 pounds a year to maintain it and

150 pounds a year to support it.

Outside developers bidding for your business conveniently forget that in their pitch!

On top of that, complying with basic security and GDPR is very costly and you would be paying for it on your own. A SaaS supplier can share those costs around hundreds or even thousands of users.

A reputable SaaS supplier can also bring specialist expertise and new modules from the accumulated experience of thousands of users to your business. They can concentrate on updating their platform, performance, bug fixes, encryption, security. Do not underestimate these expenses. Their helpdesk is always there. Your inhouse developer could be off sick or go on holiday – or leave the company just when you have a critical repair.

Thirty five client websites, including our own Staffing specialist website, have been affected by a DDOS attack this morning.

No business critical business applications are affected.

Email is not affected.

It should be resolved by the engineers at the datacentre soon. These problems are rare and this is the first in perhaps ten or more years.

Thanks for your patience. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need more information.

AXLR8 have now been supporting field marketing companies collecting data in store for 15 years.

Our clients have taught us so many things in that time.  Likewise, they are always learning and solving new problems to help their brands and other customers.

To celebrate we have created this video to explain how CFM, a growing leader, is challenging the top players in the retail merchandising and promotion fields.

It concentrates on two current challenges.

Building and developing the team

Clients need to attract the best talent in these competitive times for all recruiters.  They then need to build, train and deploy their teams on client projects.  CFM have the talent management team in place to achieve this using the AXLR8 ATS and to work with trusted specialist long-term business partners to supply staff where required.

Field Data Collection and Client Presentation

The value added by good field marketing and merchandising providers is the immediate, high volume, accurate data reliably collected in the field (e.g. sales and stock numbers, competitor pricing, before and after pictures during POS and merchandising projects)

Volume collection

Using their AXLR8 apps staff are booked on projects and specific store visits and collect data in high volumes in store.  The system has to handle thousands of data items every hour from hundreds of store visits on multiple projects.  App reliability and central database resilience is of paramount importance.  At the same time the questionnaires must be flexible so they are easy to create and easy to change midway through campaigns.

Customised client portals

Once the data starts to come in, the numbers, reports, pictures and other information has to be moderated and presented well to their clients on a secure portal

The system allows CFM to concentrate on client engagement staff relations and creative ideas as they know the admin is being handled by a reliable system that AXLR8 has customised to their needs.

This means they can focus on client specific needs. No wonder they are so successful.

AXLR8 will be running a free series of training courses for the Public Sector covering the AXLR8 IRM (Information Request Manager) system for FOI, SAR, Reviews and Appeals and Complaints.

We hope you will find these workshops as useful as AXLR8’s commercial clients did in September’s very successful series for their industries.

The 12 sessions will run at 12:30 on Wednesdays from November 10th, 2021 to February 16th, 2022.

We run all our sessions over Zoom because of the quality of presentation and reliability. However, the feedback is that this is not possible for most public sector sites. Therefore, we will run it over MS Teams. Please be patient in the first couple of sessions whilst we find our feet using this as a webinar medium.

The agenda for the training sessions are as follows:

Day	Title	Agenda	Aimed at	Date
1	Introduction – overview and definitions	Workflow supported definitions list management of an IR	Users	10th November
2	Workflow KPIs	Dashboards, tracking IRs.	Users	17th November
3	Logging a request	Request creation, auto creation, adding notes, adding documents	Users	24th November
4	IRs and activities (tasks)	Activities required to achieve the response to the IR.	Users	1st December
5	Progress tracking	The calendar: Bank holidays, FOIs and SARs. Public and private notes and documents. Alerts, triggers and expediting weekend, working days and holidays.	Users	8th December
6	Information request manager portal	Access rules, applicant blind, reports, documents and updating progress.	Users	15th December
7	Reviews and appeals	Reviews, appeals, timescales & audit. How to read audit trails, notes, history and mail attach.	Users	12th January
8	Public disclosure log	Preparation and clean up, notes, documents, privacy. API for web presentation.	SuperUsers	19th January
9	Super user functions 1	Data cleaning and retention, keeping your data clean, removing duplicates, DPIA and information asset register.	SuperUsers	26th January
10	Super user functions 2	Drop down menus, lookups, labels	SuperUsers	2nd February
11	Super user functions 3	Report builder	SuperUsers	9th February
12	Super user functions 4	Creating new user accounts, granting and revoking access rights.	SuperUsers	16th February

For more information on our Information Compliance Systems: http://www.requesttracker.co.uk/

There is a power problem in our area.

Telephones

The phones will still work. We have configured the RingCentral system to receive calls on selected mobiles. Client calls should be dealt with but we may be a little terse with incoming cold sales calls today.

Support Email

We will forward Support to a temporary mail box which will be monitored. So, you may receive an error message from our office server but the support email will get to the team. Some will be working at home.

Timecales

SSEN are working on it and will keep us updated. The local socials are going bonkers. Lights flickering occasionally everywhere.

Prevention

Hopefully, the problem will only last a few hours. Although we have large UPS storage, we will be looking for bigger reserve supplies for the office.

On 30th September, a team of us from AXLR8 went to our first trade show since lockdown. It was very professionally organised and run.

Great to meet up with so many clients and other potential technical and business collaborators.

The resilient commercial finance market is alive and kicking!

To learn more about how AXLR8 help your finance broker find more clients and process proposals quickly and easily, please contact us at 01344 776500 or send us an email.

AXLR8 is just completing a very successful “Working Lunch with AXLR8” series of seminars in our Staffing Agency vertical market. The reason is that in most of those businesses staff may have changed. Staff turnover has been huge in so many industries over the last year and knowledge needs refreshing as we enter the “New Normal”. Also, many of the clients I speak to on a daily basis have been furloughed for long periods or have been performing other jobs.

Your organisation will also be considering staff knowledge retention and changes through this (hopefully) once in a century economic upheaval. Also, there is friction slowing the uptake of in-person training (expense, fear of infection, petrol shortages as I write, etc.)

Nevertheless, so many of the mainstream and offbeat metrics show that there is an uptick in all those business areas that indicate we are coming out of the downturn. Businesses that are barometers of the economy are on the up and up!

So AXLR8 will be running two more Working Lunch with AXLR8 series. One for Finance clients in October and one for Government in November. Please watch this space. We will also circulate invitations soon so we can win some space in your diary.

As part of our investment in customer service this year, we have revolutionised the telephone system. Having surveyed the market and seen many excellent new phone systems, we have gone with BT CloudWork. Our new numbers may come through as 0203 795 3629 or our direct dials depending upon who is calling.

You can still reach us on 01344 776500. However, we have dropped our old DDI numbers which were hardly used. They became a problem when people returned individual calls without going through the switchboard. If that person was away from their desk, the customer service was a VM or transfer.

Feedback

We would be grateful for your feedback if you have any trouble getting through to customer service. We do not want anyone in voicemail jail!

Future possibilities

The system from BT is based upon RingCentral which is up there in the (Nov 2020) Gartner Magic Quadrant with MS. Others trailing in that quadrant are Zoom, 8X8 and Cisco. So far we are pleased with the implementation and will be researching all the programmer interfaces for incoming caller identification to pop screens, etc. that we had developed over 15 years with our last (Splicecom) system which was well ahead of its time.

We are already dialling out direct from the AXLR8 Radical internal CRM system.

All calls will be recorded for training and quality purposes and the next development is to store them against the support ticket as we do with emails. That way all the information about a case is kept in the right “job bag”.

If you are planning phone integration with your AXLR8 system, please call us up. We heve been doing it for more than 20 years so you will be in safe hands.