07 January 2020 - 7 min read
Carl Holloway
Founder
Last week I helped write a case study with one of our customers and they said something awesome:
“On the surface Rotaready and some of their peers look very similar, but when you get past the feature check-lists and actually use the product and speak with the team, it’s clear Rotaready is leagues ahead.”
We always share customer feedback (good and bad) with the whole team and naturally everyone was delighted to receive such praise. But this quote really stuck with me.
In my head I caught myself saying “they get it!”
Here’s 7 reasons why:
We’ve never built a feature just to tick a box or to ‘level the playing field’ with a competitor. Nor do we pretend we do something when we really don’t.
Sometimes this works against us, especially on product comparison websites. Often a feature that’s only half implemented or badly thought out still counts as a tick in the box.
But we’d rather publicly say we don’t do something – at the cost of that checkbox being empty – than claim otherwise and disappoint our users with a poor experience.
We release a new feature when it’s been researched, prototyped, designed, engineered and tested. And we keep iterating until we have something we’re really proud of.
P.S. This is intentionally point number one. If our product were a meal or a drink, this is the oft-overlooked main ingredient. Would you expect a cocktail made from cheap spirits and mixers to taste great?
We make a commitment to every customer that they’ll always have a dedicated person at Rotaready who knows them on first name terms.
As a small business, we know exactly what it feels like to be forgotten by some of our enterprise-sized suppliers. We never want our customers to feel that way about us.
We also try to visit as many of our customers as we can in-person. Sometimes our designers and engineers come along too. They like to see how Rotaready’s being used in the wild so they can make things better.
We love integrations. From day one we designed Rotaready to be incredibly integration-friendly.
And to borrow a phrase from point one, we don’t build our integrations ‘by halves’ either. Each one has to meet the following criteria before we’ll release it for use:
We’ve been there. You find yourself talking to a peer about a product you both use, the conversation moves on to money and it transpires they got a terrific deal and you’re paying twice as much. It’s not particularly fair.
Impracticalities aside, you wouldn’t dine in a restaurant where everyone negotiates their own bill. But much of the software world is exactly that.
We took the bold step of publishing a simple, transparent pricing model on our website, so you know you’re getting a fair deal. And we hope this honesty and transparency shows the values and morals we believe in as a business.
(Enterprise customers with 100s of sites do unfortunately fall out of scope here as they have bespoke needs and requirements that cost us more money to meet. We’ll always work with you to come to a fair price and ensure all your requirements are met).
What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘call centre’? I doubt words like passion, exuberance and dynamism spring to mind.
When hiring for our support team, the last thing we look for is call centre experience. We hire vibrant, engaging personalities who’ve worked in face-to-face roles. And then we train them up to be Rotaready experts.
The majority of all support queries are resolved on the very first call. And pulling together phone calls, emails and live chats, we currently answer over 90% of queries within four hours. Not bad.
We also intentionally sit our support team metres away from the developers and product designers. We believe this fosters a symbiotic relationship – for many reasons outside of the scope of this post – and keeps the feedback loop small.
Other than a few features that only our enterprise customers find useful, like multiple currencies and SSO, everyone gets access to the entire Rotaready product.
Our iOS and Android mobile apps, text messaging, document storage, you name it… it’s included and unlimited.
We’re continually innovating too. So whenever a new feature is released, it’s immediately available to everyone. There’s no such thing as “different versions” of Rotaready – everyone’s on the latest version, always.
We’ve delivered over 100 features and updates in the last couple of years alone, and there’s no sign of that stopping.
It’s a bold claim, but we have the stats and monitoring to prove it. In the last 18 months, we haven’t had one second of downtime.
And we’ve managed this while releasing hundreds of updates.
We’ve worked incredibly hard to build a cutting-edge technology platform that allows us to innovate at speed while providing the resilience and dependability that our hospitality and retail customers count on.
As our customer said at the start of this post, it takes using Rotaready and working with our team to really get a feel for what we’re about. But I understand that’ll take up a little more of your time than you probably have spare, so hopefully this post has served as a useful substitute.
If you have any comments, queries or feedback on this post, I’d love to hear from you. Just drop us a live chat and ask to speak to me.
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