Case Studies

Competing Against Free Software

Case Studies

Creating Customer Service Standards to Differentiate the Customer Experience Understanding the Emotions That Drive Customer Behavior Leveraging Best Practices of High Performers Engaging Employees in Building the Vision Competing Against Free Software

Situation

Our client was selling software to a professional group that also had access to much of the same functionality from free sources.

Approach

We created an online survey for our client that was designed to support derived importance analysis, a multivariate technique that looks for attributes that correlate highly with a measure of satisfaction. The most powerful measure of satisfaction with many products and services is an individual's response to the "would you recommend" question. By approaching attribute importance this way, you avoid the misleading responses that can arise when you ask directly: "which of these attributes is most important to you?"

Result

Analysis of the data showed that certain software attributes were much more important than others. This was significant because the professionals were relying on the software to help them do their work and earn revenue from their clients. By identifying the areas where our client's software was superior, they gained a much stronger basis for competing with "free."

Bonus

By including an open-ended question where respondents could comment on any topic at the end of the survey, we learned - in the respondents own words - about a number of other issues that were important to them. A few of these issues were suspected, but are now being addressed in the business plan.