Factors to Consider When Choosing Software
What is the value and how much does it cost?
Pricing is crucial to any decision you make pertaining to the business. However, this shouldn’t be the only variable taken into account. Making your decisions based on price point only doesn’t necessarily mean that you are getting the best value. Note that a software’s cost doesn’t always correspond to its value.
Buying more high-end software because you’ve seen it has a long list of additional features isn’t always the prudent move, since most of those additional features may not even be applicable to your enterprise or be compatible with your system. When taking into account the pricing, start with a standard budget and choose your ‘must-have’ features that are in line with your price point. From there, draft a ‘don’t need’ and ‘nice to have’ feature list. This will assist you to acquire value software that benefits your business.
When reviewing reasonably-priced products, be careful not to purchase software that won’t evolve with your business. Make projections of your business in five or 10 years, and check how the software expenses will go up with an increased number of processes, users, or products. From the data you acquire, you may soon realise that the inexpensive product will turn out to be costly down the road as compared to other choices. Thinking about the future and how the software you acquire will affect your business will assist you to choose a quality product that is in line with your business goals. If you need support desk software then see here.
Will you require assisted implementation?
It would be best to select software that your staff can acclimatise to easily and quickly. Going for a highly intricate model that consumes a significant amount of time to get conversant with will only affect the rate at which it is adopted. Do extensive research on prospective software alternatives so you make the most beneficial and efficient decision for your team and company.
If your business needs more extensive or complex software, you should review their assisted implementation plan. This will ascertain that you’re able to get it operational as fast as possible and also ensure employees are adequately trained. If you will need to commit to implementation costs, ensure you have taken into account costs and definite timeliness before you buy. Ensure you have reviewed the satisfaction guarantee of the company – a company that doesn’t have faith in their product to fulfil the intended purpose through the whole implementation process should not be trusted.
Is the software company prepared to fix bugs?
Bugs are expected to be found in software. If you want to buy the correct software for your business, you should be conversant with the procedures of the software company with regard to fixing bugs when they crop up. You should know how the potential problems you may run into will get handled. Ensure that the company will deal with the issues that are unique to your organisation’s usage of the software, and not the major issues that many software’s uses encounter.
The best way of investigating a company’s service and client satisfaction is by going through customer reviews. Such reviews will give you an insight into any frequent software problems, how the business reacts to such problems and a high-level viewpoint of weaknesses and strengths.
How often do they push updates?
The top software service providers are constantly updating their products. Before buying any software, enquire how often they do software updates. If a service is limited or restricted because of product updates, you should know.