Reviewing from the wrong perspective

Through a combination of bad planning on my part and staff holidays, I ended up covering support this weekend.

It was interesting to see an old chestnut come up in the form of this email from an accountant.

Not impressed at all! Having been in practice over 20 years I can only say I won’t be recommending to ANY of my clients!

Further questioning on my part revealed

Not at all user friendly in setting up additional nominal ledger codes! Sage far more useful and better instructions

I’ve seen these kinds of comments from accountants before. What usually happens is that they hear the hype about KashFlow, often from a client, and decide to investigate for themselves.

Rather than looking at the software via our Accountants interface, they dive straight in to the end user software. They usually concede that Sage is too confusing for their clients, but they like Sage themselves.

As we deliberately set out to be different from Sage (why replicate the problem you’re trying to solve?) they find the way KashFlow does things to be counter-intuitive and deduce from that that their clients (the ones who don’t like and wont use Sage, remember) wont like it.

Spot the flaw in that logic?

Sure, an accountant needs to do some due diligence on a piece of software before they recommend it to their clients, but still too many make the mistake of reviewing the software from their highly-trained perspective, rather than from the perspective of the people they’re reviewing it for.

Although often when they’re given a guided  tour of our Partner Programme software and see the benefits to them of their clients using the software, they start to change their mind.

Then when they get their clients to look at the software for themselves, they’re sold.

And to finish things off, here’s another email we received on support this weekend from a web hosting company.There’s nothing exceptional about it, we get emails like this on just about a daily basis but we never tire of receiving them!

From: Jim McDonald
Subject: 1st Class Product

Dear KashFlow, I just wanted to drop you a email to say how fantastic your product is.

There are loads of great features on KashFlow and aside from a great price and ease of use and first class support from the KashFlow team the main one for us is the plug in for the billing system we use WHMCS, being able to update our accounts program when we make a sale is a great help and allows us to streamline our business.

Our only regret about KashFlow is we did not find this sooner!!

Kind Regards

Jim McDonald
Webhost 4 Less