Minimum Viable Service: Why Less is Best When it Comes to SaaS Customer Service

Professional services strategist Ken Lownie explains why going lean with your services will help ensure deeper, faster adoption of your solution.

In my conversations with leaders of SaaS and software companies, one question often comes up: “How much of my revenue should come from services?”

Many times the answer is discussed in relation to the market valuation of the company or to partnering strategies, but in reality the answer is simple. Your services revenue should be as small as it can be, or more precisely it should be the revenue you generate while providing the minimum viable service.

Minimum Viable Service: Getting Customers Up & Running with as Little Additional Effort as Possible

Most developers of web applications are familiar with the idea of the Minimum Viable Product, a concept popularized by Eric Ries. It’s built on the idea that in order to gain the best insights into customers’ needs you should first deploy the smallest amount of functionality possible. You can then evolve the solution based on the insights provided by early adopters.

For SaaS vendors, a similar idea is helpful. Since the goal in the SaaS model is to get your new customers onto your solution as fast as possible, you should build as much of the configuration and set-up into the product as possible. The remaining services that are delivered by the company’s services team should be the minimum viable service required to get customers on-board and productive with the solution.

In this formulation, the word “viable” is critical, and refers to the viability of the customer as a user of the solution. In other words, just having the smallest set of services is not the goal — it is having the smallest set of services that will allow the customer to become a highly successful and reference-able user of the solution.

Are You Offering Minimal Viable Service? 5 Questions to Ask

1. Are initial configurations for typical use cases built into the product and selectable by parameters to minimize the requirement for services?
2. Are you providing a “whole service” that is everything the customer needs to become proficient quickly in terms of training and implementation services?
3. Are you measuring your services business by revenue alone (not good) or by metrics that gauge the speed and depth of customer’s adoption (now we’re talking)?
4. Are you building tools and methods that result in a repeatable implementation process based on a proven model?
5. Do you gather the services and product team together periodically to explicitly exchange ideas on how to move configuration steps into the product?

When viewed through this lens, the question of how big your services business should be is not answered by your revenue goals or concerns about valuation. The answer is specific to every vendor, and it relates to the nature of your solution, how much of the implementation activities can be baked into the product, and how much help new customers need to become viable users.

If you are providing the minimum viable service then you can be sure you are doing everything you need to drive deep, rapid adoption of your solution, and trust me — the valuation of your company will take care of itself.

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Photo by: Kelly Cookson