Picking up where he left off a year ago, James Foxall, president and CEO of Tigerpaw Software Inc., kicked off the 2016 edition of the PSA software maker’s annual partner event in Omaha, Neb., today by encouraging users to capitalize on the company’s Tigerpaw One licensing offer.
Introduced at last year’s conference, Tigerpaw One provides access to all of the vendor’s core and add-on application modules for one monthly per-user fee designed to be roughly the same as what most companies would otherwise pay for maintenance alone.
“Our goal is we want you to embrace the power of one and use it all,” Foxall said of Tigerpaw’s product suite during a keynote address this morning. “This is not something that we’re trying to make money on.”
Companies that utilize Tigerpaw’s traditional pricing scheme, in which buyers pay upfront for perpetual concurrent usage rights to individual system modules, often miss out on large portions of what Tigerpaw’s solution can do, he added, noting that 35.3 percent of Tigerpaw customers don’t currently use the vendor’s mobile app, 50.7 percent don’t use the customer portal feature, and 75 percent don’t take advantage of Tigerpaw’s customer payment processing functionality.
“We want to solve that problem, which is why we created Tigerpaw One,” Foxall stated.
Though he didn’t provide adoption figures for the new licensing model, Foxall did note that utilization of optional Tigerpaw components hasn’t changed significantly in the last year, suggesting that Tigerpaw One has yet to make serious inroads on the issue it’s meant to tackle. Many conference attendees who do use it, however, prefer Tigerpaw One to the vendor’s legacy payment scheme, which can result in too many employees competing for too few concurrent user licenses.
“The concurrent model had its shortcomings, because we felt like no matter how well we thought we were set up, there was an instance where somebody couldn’t get into Tigerpaw,” says Chet Neal, president of Sound Stage Inc., an audio-visual integrator and digital signage solution provider in Winter Park, Fla. Switching to Tigerpaw One has eliminated that problem without costing the company more money.
“It also gives us more features than we currently have, so there’s a price advantage and a feature advantage at the same time,” added Andrew McClelland, Sound Stage’s operations manager.
Stuart, Fla.-based IT and telecommunications provider Joy Communications has experienced similar results, according to president and CEO Peter Engle, who says that Tigerpaw One has enabled the company to deploy added functions that have streamlined key administrative processes.
“We’ve dramatically collapsed the time it takes to process orders,” Engle reports. “That’s going to have a huge impact on our cash flow.”
Channel pros like Engle had praise as well for the improvements they’ve seen recently in Tigerpaw’s phone-based technical support. According to Foxall, shortening wait times for callers has been one of the company’s top priorities over the last year.
“We’re putting a lot of energy and resources in making sure we’re taking care of you,” he said during his keynote.
As a result, he continued, the average hold time for telephone support assistance is down from 12 minutes and 20 seconds a year ago to 4 minutes and 48 seconds today, and the percentage of callers who simply hang up in frustration rather than continue waiting has dropped from 18.5 percent to 10.1 percent.
Michael Meldrum is one of many Tigerpaw partners who have noticed the difference.
“There was a time there that it was a struggle for us, because there were long wait times,” says Meldrum, who is president and CEO of Complete Interactive Technologies Inc., a communications solution provider in Clinton Township, Mich. “As of late it’s been much better.”
Engle agrees. “My guys are saying that it’s a lot better than it used to be,” he states.
The 2016 Tigerpaw Conference resumes tomorrow morning with a second Foxall keynote during which he will introduce attendees to version 16.1 of the vendor’s flagship PSA application. That release, which officially ships next Monday, includes enhanced project management functionality, as well as new quote merging and billing consolidation features.
