There is a particular class of shopping that starts the day a small business admits the mail has got away from it altogether, and it nearly always begins with a search and a page of tools with tick boxes down the side of them. It ends one of two ways. Either the wrong thing gets bought, on account of the tick boxes deciding it, or the tabs get closed on a busy afternoon and nothing gets bought at all and the mail carries on the way it was carrying on. Nobody decides that second one either. There is no meeting where six people sit down and agree to keep losing the odd customer. Nobody would go and sign that.
Tadhg was not shopping for anything the day he found his. He has a stove and fireplace crowd outside Ennis, six of them counting himself and the two lads on the vans, and he went into the mail hunting a price he had quoted a woman back in March, on account of a suspicion he had gone and undercharged her. He found the quote. Underneath it he found three messages from that same woman about a missing flue part, spread across five weeks, and two answers to them from two of his own people a fortnight apart, one saying the part was on order and the other saying the yoke was discontinued altogether. Both of them had replied inside the day, mind you. Neither had ever laid eyes on the other’s reply. And the woman went quiet after the second one and never did come back about the second stove she had been talking about in the spring.
He went looking for a number and found that instead. Which is how most of these turn up, truth be told, since nobody ever goes and looks for the thing directly, and that is the shape of it.
What a small firm is actually buying here, and it is not a feature list
The thing being bought is never customer service software, whatever the invoice says. It is the end of one specific bother, and the bother is different in every business and it is always smaller and more particular than the software pages let on, on account of them having to be written for everybody at once.
For Tadhg it was two people answering the one woman without either knowing. A florist I know has a different one entirely, hers is that every order query arrives at an address three people can see and none of them owns, so the ones that need a phone call sit there until the customer rings in cross. There is a lad doing bike repairs who has the simplest version going, he answers everything himself and answers it well, and the whole of it comes down to the thing living on a phone he might drop.
Get the bother named first, in plain words, before you go looking at a single page. Name it your own self. Otherwise you are shopping against a list somebody else wrote, and their list was written for a support team of thirty with a manager over them.
Why the software you compare is never the software you end up needing
Comparison pages have to be filled in, and what goes into them is whatever can be counted. So you get a column for how many channels a thing does, and another for the number of integrations it claims, and somewhere down the page there will be a tick beside automation and another beside surveys. All of that is genuinely true and none of it is a lie. It is chosen by what fits in a column rather than by what decides anything, which is the whole of the trouble with it.
The things that actually decide it for a six person firm will not go in a column at all. Take the way a reply looks when it lands with the customer, whether it reads like it came from your firm or from a piece of software with your name pasted at the top of it. Nobody counts that. Then there is the Monday somebody leaves and their mail is sat in their own account, and what becomes of it is a question most firms only ask the once, after it has already happened to them. Can the fella standing in a yard in Kilrush with one bar of signal answer a customer off his phone without wanting to fire the thing into a hedge. And can you put your hand on a message from three weeks back inside the minute, which sounds like nothing at all until it is a Friday and a solicitor is asking.
And there is the awkward part of it, the tools that score best on the countable stuff are usually built for the crowd who need the countable stuff, which is companies with a support department. You are not that. You are six people with vans.
The afternoon he broke the shortlist
Tadhg had three tabs open for the guts of a week and read nothing useful off any of them, so on the Thursday he stopped reading and started poking. Four hours of poking. He says it told him more than the whole week had.
He started by writing to himself. He made a free mail account with a made-up name on it and sent in an ordinary customer question, the sort he gets twenty of a week, something about whether a particular stove takes a five inch flue. Then he answered it from inside each tool and looked at what landed back in the made-up account. One of them came back looking exactly like a mail from his own firm and nothing else. Another arrived with a reference number in square brackets in the subject line and a footer about a support portal, and he said straight out that he would not go and send that to a woman in Ennis buying a stove.
Then he handed his phone to Ciarán, who is twenty three and on the vans and has never once read a page of instructions in his life. He asked him to answer a message. The one Ciarán got working inside two minutes without asking a question stayed on the list. The one that had him pinching and scrolling and eventually saying he would do it back at the yard did not, and fair is fair, that is a harder test than most software ever gets put through.
He asked the awkward question of the sales people as well, the one about a person leaving. He wanted to know what becomes of a mailbox and its history when a name comes off the account, and he asked it plainly, and the answers he got back varied a great deal more than he expected they would, no two ways about it.
Then there was the December sum, which he left till last. He does not have six people in December, he has eight, on account of taking on two seasonal for the run up to Christmas when everybody wants a stove in before the cold. So he priced each tool at eight instead of six and one of the three went and doubled on him.
The price is never the price on the page
Nearly all of this software is sold by the head, and by the head is a fine way to sell to a company where the heads are a fixed thing. In a small firm the heads are not fixed at all.
Count who actually needs to be in there and you will get a bigger number than you expect. The two on the vans first, obviously enough. Then whoever does the invoices, on account of the guts of the mail coming in being about invoices, and the Saturday lad has to be in there as well, since he is the one covering the phone while everybody else is out on installs. And yourself, of course. That is six or seven before you have thought about it at all, in a business that only has six people in it, and half of them will send four messages a month between them. Paying full whack per head for a person who answers on Saturdays is how a small firm ends up either paying twice what it meant to or quietly locking people out of the mail they need, and the locking out is worse, since it puts you back where you started with things living in one person’s account.
There are two other costs on top and neither shows up on a pricing page anywhere. One is the fortnight of getting the thing in, which nobody has going spare. The other only ever shows its self the day you want back out again. Ask before you sign whether you can take the whole of your mail history out in one go and in a format you could actually open. Most will say yes. It is worth hearing them say it.
Most of what gets sold to you is built for somebody a good deal bigger
Tadhg gets maybe eleven mails a day in a normal week and twenty five in October when the cold comes in. At that volume there is a long list of things he was shown that he has no business paying for.
Workflow builders with branching rules on them are grand when a thing passes between four departments. There are no departments in Ennis. Satisfaction surveys after every reply, at eleven a day, is asking a woman to rate you for telling her a flue size. He was shown deflection as well, the notion being that a machine answers so a person does not have to, and here I have to be straight rather than clever about it, on account of us selling that sort of thing our own selves on the dearer plan. At eleven mails a day it is not your problem. It becomes worth something when the same question arrives forty times a week and a person is typing the same answer out over and over, and until you are at that, you are buying a solution to a volume you do not have.
Plain and simple, buy for the year you are in. You can go and buy the clever stuff the year it starts hurting, and it will still be sat there waiting, and it will be a good deal better than it is now.
Where a tool like Maxdesk fits, said without the sales voice
I would sooner say straight out that this is the sort of firm we built Maxdesk for than have the piece stroll onto the subject and pretend it was an accident.
The clearest way to put it is to describe Tadhg’s Tuesday now instead of listing off what the thing does. A woman writes in about a flue part, to the very same address on the van and on the website that she always wrote to, and she knows nothing about any of it. The message lands in one place that all six of them can see, and it carries an owner the moment somebody picks it up, so the second man opening the mail can see plainly that Ciarán has it and leaves it be. That one thing on its own would have gone and saved the woman in March.
When Ciarán answers, it goes out looking like it came from the firm. If he is on a van and does not know the answer, the flue sizes are sat in a knowledge base he can read off his phone, along with the delivery lead times and the warranty wording that everybody used to guess at. Tadhg has it mind the clock on how long a thing has been sitting there, which matters far more in October than it does in June. And when the Saturday lad finished up in the spring, none of his mail went anywhere with him, which is a sentence Tadhg could not have said the year before.
The whole of it runs as a shared inbox on the address the firm already advertises, so no customer has to be told anything and no cards have to be reprinted. Proper help desk software is not a big heavy thing to put on a six person firm any more, whatever it was ten years ago.
On the money, there is nothing charged per head on it and there is a free plan, which is the whole reason the December sum does not bite. Fair is fair though, there is a trade in the free plan and you may as well hear it from me rather than find it out. The free workspace carries some supporting ads, puts a small Maxdesk line at the foot of the mail going out, and keeps three months of history rather than the whole of forever, and the longer archive is the thing the paid plans are for.
The part this does not fix its self
We do email and nothing else, and for a firm like Tadhg’s that is a real limit and not a small one. A fair share of stove buying happens on the phone and always will, and there is no phone line behind Maxdesk, nor a chat bubble for your website, nor a portal for customers to be logging into. The call Ciarán takes in the van is no part of it and never will be. If the bulk of your customer work happens by voice then a thing built around email is only ever going to be half your answer and I would be doing you no favour dressing it up otherwise.
It is not a CRM either, mind you, and it does not do quotes nor invoices nor stock, so the price Tadhg went looking for that day still lives over in the accounts package where it always lived.
And the plainest one of all, no software decides who answers. It will show you that a message has been sat there since Tuesday with nobody’s name on it, and that is a great deal more than a plain inbox ever showed anybody, but the agreeing on who covers the mail on install days is a conversation between people, and it stays that way, and no software anywhere is going to go and have it for you.
Where to start, if this sounds like your mail
Do the made-up customer trick first, since it costs nothing and it takes twenty minutes. Send a real looking question into your own address from an outside account and see how long it sits, and whether two people answer it, and whether the reply that comes back looks like your firm or like a machine. Then go back through the last month and count the messages that got two answers or none at all. That number is the size of your problem and it is usually not the number you would have guessed at your own self.
Then count your real seats, December included, before you look at any price on any page. And when you do try something, try it on a bad week rather than a quiet one, with somebody out sick, on the actual mail coming in, on account of a demo on a Tuesday afternoon proving nothing whatsoever about a firm’s worst Friday.
If it turns out that what you need is the mail in one place with a name on each of them, you can put Maxdesk on the address you already have and watch it work against your own messages inside a few minutes, which is a more honest test of whether any of this suits you than reading another page about it would ever be.