It got even better in 1989, when Laub spearheaded yet another innovation. Concerned about rising phone bills, she explored ways to control costs. The solution, she determined, was an automatic call-distribution system.
"I had no idea Lori was doing this until she came to me with this big-cost item," Burgum recalls. But Laub's initiative was exactly what he wanted to see. He pushes authority down through the ranks and urges innovation from the bottom up. "I give the green light whenever I can," he says. "I can't make all the decisions. The only way people can grow is if you let them take risks."
In this case, the risk paid large dividends. The call-distribution system was installed and bridged with the customer database. Now when users call and punch in their account numbers -- their 10-digit phone numbers -- the system knows instantly who is calling, which software modules that customer owns, and which support plan he or she is on. The call is automatically routed to a specialist trained to deal with it.
In most cases, by the time the specialist picks up the phone, he or she is already looking at a computer screen featuring a wealth of information about the caller. The specialist knows how often the customer has called before, who handled the calls, and what advice was given over the past six months. With no need to recap previous conversations, they get into problem solving faster.
Granted, all this hasn't been easy. Or cheap. To date, Great Plains has invested $678,000 in the new phone apparatus and related software, plus $452,000 for the computer terminals. But the new system has been worth the expense. It makes everything so much speedier, Laub says, that the equipment has more than paid for itself in phone-bill savings.
It also has yielded stunning results. On a typical day, 1,100 calls come in, and half are handled by a support specialist immediately. Since the advent of the guaranteed response, 99.13% of calls have been returned on time. A tote board in the customer-service department keeps a daily running tally of calls returned within the guarantee. The record: some 126,400 in a row.
Customers so appreciate the service that the specialists routinely get thank-you letters, flowers, and gifts. One specialist was flown to Chicago with his wife to attend a Bears football game and have dinner with a customer. Even the "partners" get in on the act. Bill Sorensen, a Great Plains dealer in Dallas, throws a margarita party for the support folks at Stampede, the annual resellers meeting in Fargo. "More than 30% of the referrals I get are from existing customers," he says. "So you know there are lots of satisfied users out there, and support has a lot to do with it."
With reaction that positive, Great Plains is able to attract quality people to handle the phone queries. Every one of them is a college graduate. Some are CPAs. "It builds on itself," says Burgum, "and service gets even better."
The bottom line certainly doesn't suffer. As support quality has increased, so have support-plan prices. Maintenance contracts start at $125 a year. Then come the standard and premium versions, priced from $295 to $1,525, depending on options. Each plan includes free updates, 30% upgrade discounts, and a payroll-tax-change service. At the top is the $3,595 comprehensive package for larger customers who want the works. They even get 32 hours of schooling at Great Plains University (GPU), which rotates through major U.S. and Canadian cities.
"Every time we've raised prices, we've encountered very little resistance," says Laub. "I think they've learned to trust us to deliver what they need." Indeed, 68% of Great Plains customers are enrolled in one plan or another. The company strives to maintain that high rate, and here again it relies on its customer list. All new buyers get direct mailings describing the services. Meanwhile, dealers pitch the plans to clients; they get 10% commissions on them. Resellers make money consulting for their clients, but vendor backup is important, especially for small-dealer operations.
Reseller Lindy Thomas, for example, runs a one-person shop in San Francisco. "I have 65 Great Plains customers, who always turn to me for help," says Thomas, a CPA. "But I like to go on vacation once in a while. While I'm gone, I know that my people will be taken care of."
Back in Fargo, Dawn Mathern's installed-base sales group tracks customers whose support plans are expiring. With eight weeks to go, they get a reminder in the mail. If they still haven't renewed with one week left, Mathern's team hits the phones. "We always follow up and make sure they got on a plan if they wanted to," she says. "If the check doesn't arrive, we call them again. We even send mailings to people whose plans have expired to try to get them back."
That effort pays off. In recent years renewals have averaged 85%. Support plans have contributed about 20% of Great Plains' revenues. Payroll-tax maintenance adds about 4.8%, and training chips in 4.4%. In 1991 those services brought in approximately $6.9 million, nearly a third of total sales.
"We've learned that you don't need to view customer support only as a cost of doing business," Burgum says. "It can be a profit center. For us it's become a nice annuity."
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Computer technology is evolving so fast that a company like Great Plains is only as good as the software it develops for tomorrow. Great Plains uses its customer list to ensure that the next generation of its products will meet real customer needs.
At any given time, for instance, the company is managing 10,000 to 15,000 active suggestions. They stream in from resellers, CPAs, and installers. Some come from the trainers, who talk with customers at GPU classes. Others make their way in via support specialists. The ideas range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but all are filed in a suggestion database. The product-marketing team peruses them at least quarterly, searching for patterns. "We compile a roster of all the different things that might fit together into a module," says Cecil Bordages, director of product marketing. "We try to find some logical way of grouping them into a feature list."
