Implementing Continuous Customer Care: First-Hand Experiences from an Industrial Setting

With the traditional on-site installation model of enterprise software, end-user characteristics often remain at least partly unknown to the system providers. While users are typically modeled and their personas described during the development, those models and personas are rarely verified or refined based on operative usage of the system after installation. There are several reasons for this, but often the main reason is that it is simply too hard to obtain reliable and comprehensive information on the system usage from an on-site installation. The software as a service (SaaS) model introduces drastic improvement to the situation, as the service provider can now have direct access to the user data and analyze it, if agreed appropriately with the customer. In this paper, we present experiences regarding a company's transition from a provider of installed software systems to a SaaS provider from the viewpoint of customer care and related activities. The paper is based on observations gained with an industrial system that has recently experienced such transition. The results, although partly preliminary, already show that many of our assumptions on the user behavior may not hold true and substantial effort is required to understand various user needs thoroughly. As the studied company is just starting the journey to create customer care processes for the SaaS era, in addition to the descriptions of the current designs and implementations, some plans for future work are presented. These plans aim to better understand the changing role of softer aspects in software engineering when adopting the SaaS paradigm.