The top five reasons to partner for the development of your customer portal.
You’re a utility company wanting to launch a new customer portal solution. You have two choices: develop the solution in-house or externalise the service to a software company specialised in energy consumer platforms.
The arguments for developing a service yourself can sometimes appear obvious, you get to specify exactly what you want (let’s assume you know exactly what you want) and you do not have to deal with a complicated and expensive supplier. On the other side, partnering with the right SaaS (Software as a Service) provider renders these arguments for developing in-house obsolete.
Here are five reasons why you should choose a SaaS partner instead of doing it yourself :
Customisations
To have your product exactly as you imagine you want it, is important, right? The thing is though, partnering with an experienced and leading company gives you just that - experience. It’s likely you’ll get what you want, and even much more, things you didn’t fully realise you needed at the start. While partnering with a company who knows the blueprint for what a successful customer portal solution should contain, you’re going to get 95% of the product as you want it (or better) with no extra development costs. Out of the box. The extra 5% is usually easily customisable and can be added on top. 5% customisation is always cheaper than 100%.
Product improvements
Today users expect state of the art user experience and if you don’t live up to those standards, they are happily willing to change to a better product made by your competitor. Beating or even just keeping on par with major competitors will require a large software and product development team. You’ll need to be agile and move fast. Using a SaaS service from a company whose core business it is to stay relevant and on top of UX and current trends ensures you automatically get all the latest innovation and updates, without having to invest heavily yourself on developments of new features and improvements.
Underestimated maintenance
The cost of maintaining a digital product is always underestimated. If you look at the cost of building the product from zero, it might not look prohibitively expensive at the start. Then suddenly you need to replace dependencies on depreciated products, you need to fix critical bugs, ensure you follow new compliance rules, integrate new technologies, etc. All the stuff that would just be part of an ongoing SaaS agreement.
Time to market
Developing something yourself requires you to build the service from zero, as we’ve mentioned. This includes all the preliminary market research and usability testing, through to software development. Investing in a SaaS service means most of that work is already done and the product can be delivered in a fraction of the time. In competitive markets, such as the one for utilities, where being constantly innovative is an immense advantage, the cost of waiting for you products to be complete can be even more costly than that of the actual product development.
GridPocket’s SaaS solution is low-risk and cost efficient
Great software engineers and product developers are increasingly hard and expensive to find. At GridPocket, we have a passionate and highly skilled team that will help you succeed with our proven SaaS solution. A platform that not only includes technology but also our unique utilities market experience.
With GridPocket’s SaaS offering you get a ready, turn-key, white-label platform that’s customised to become uniquely yours, with continuous product updates and improvements. The cherry on top of the cake: we can have the platform deployed in a matter of month!
More information? Please contact us!