Signs Your Market Pricing Technology Provider Is Falling Behind

If your compensation technology provider is starting to fall behind, they won’t tell you about it. Instead, you’ll need to figure it out for yourself. Here are the most common signs that your provider is getting lost and may be starting to collapse.

Compensation market pricing technology is one of the few sectors that hasn’t kept up with broader technology trends. Every legacy vendor uses services based appraoch (aka people running around doing things) to do large scale data manipulation. Have you ever sent surveys to your provider and they’ve taken weeks to load them? Have you ever been through a year-over-year update and, after waiting weeks for the “migration” to finish, you’re then left with a pile of “stuff” (to put it nicely) to clean up? It’s slow because they use people to do what the technology should do instead. When people get busy, service slows down or gets sloppy - worse yet, sometimes both.

Why is this a bigger problem than just waiting a few weeks? If you’re seen survey loading times creep up from 1-2 days to 2-3 weeks, you know there’s a problem, because that’s just the tip of the iceberg - they know it’s slow, and there’s nothing they can do it about. The technology is too old and brittle to keep up with customer needs and they have to band-aid it with people running around. That's no way to run a business if your focus is on customer satisfaction.

Many businesses need to raise prices from time to time, but this should happen only on occasion. Companies that are growing and bringing in new customers don’t need to worry about raising prices to fund growth. At most, they may adjust prices at the time of a multi-year renewal, to keep pace with their own changing costs.

When a business is stagnant or showing signs of failure, however, they face a problem. If a customer is locked into a multi-year agreement vendors can introduce a higher level of service at a “premium” and reduce the current level of service to a minimum, all while staying in compliance with their obligations under existing agreement.

But that sucks for you as the customer. The great service you’ve gotten for years is now either slow or it costs more just to have the same level of service you had before.

Signs that changes in service charges are connected to a business falling behind include:

1. Services that used to be bundled together are now separated and cost more when combined

2. Services that used to be free now cost money.

3. "New” service tiers are revealed, with higher prices and new names but few or no additional features.

When your technology provider starts using these techniques, they probably aren’t innovating and they’re not growing, so they’re looking for other paths to generate more revenue.

Sales demos are supposed to be honest, accurate, and impressive demonstrations of the services a company offers. However, if a business is struggling, sales demos can quickly become more fiction than fact. If you were initially impressed by your provider’s sales demos but their actual services don’t live up to the hype, then they might be over-promising.

A sales demo is easy to put together, but supporting a fully functional service is hard. Demos allow the sales team to highlight specific attractive scenarios and features while ignoring problems that lurk under the surface. Instead of relying on sales demos, look at your provider’s overall track record and reviews from other clients; you’ll get a much more well-rounded look into the company’s success.

When companies aren't getting the growth that they want, they have to cut cost. I heard of a SaaS company that thought they could swap out all the 80% of the experienced customer successs managers with less expensive resources and customers wouldn't care. How do you think that went?

This problem is compounded when there's a heavy services component (again, people running around doing stuff) rather than a technology first approach. If your provider uses a heavy services approach AND decides to cut back on the staff that they used to support you, well, good luck with that.

BetterComp uses technology rather than people to get your surveys loaded either in advance or in only minutes. We also make your entire market pricing process Better, from job matching, to choosing the right cuts, to updating your market pricings year-over-year.

Want to check what makes us a Better way to manage your market pricing process?

Shoot me an email at alan.miegel@bettercomp.com and we’ll take you through what makes BetterComp...Better.