Solware maintains customer satisfaction in a SaaS model

Solware’s two distinct areas of business—Solware Auto, business unit with its WINmotor dealer management solution, and its Solware Life, a business unit with its easysuite healthcare management and traceability system—serve very different audiences, but the common denominator is the focus on customer satisfaction through a best-of-class user experience. This firm emphasis on the human values of customer relationships is what sets Solware apart from its competition.

Maintaining customer satisfaction in a SaaS model

As an early adopter of SaaS technology, Solware quickly realized the potential of hosting cloud-based automotive and healthcare web applications. Solware Auto has over 20,000 users of WINmotor within French, European, and North African car dealerships, and Solware Life has over 100,000 users of easysuite within the medical profession. On average, over 6,000 connected users access a Solware platform every day.

Customer satisfaction is vital, Yannick Franҫois, CIO for Solware, says, "It’s not just the system uptime and performance of the application which we need to monitor; we have to make sure the overall customer experience is a positive one." Solware Life includes web (easysuite) and mobile modules (easytab), which contain health or personal data covered by a specific health data hosting regulation in France and Europe. This means that some data needs to be masked. As Yannick explains, "Our software easysuite is under constant development and we regularly roll out new versions to our users to introduce new technical or functional features. This means our parameters move all the time, making it hard for us to easily pinpoint the source when problems arise."

With thousands of clients, if things go wrong, they tend to go really wrong and it’s easy to become entirely wrapped up in managing customer complaints instead of solving the main issue that is causing the problem. "We had a few basic technical monitors and could spend days trying to resolve an incident, tying up our valuable resources," says Yannick. "Often a problem wouldn’t even be at our end, but we just didn’t have the insight we needed to make that diagnosis."                

Supporting a scalable growth model

Solware planned to grow its business aggressively but the current model just wasn’t scalable. It investigated the market to find an easy-to-deploy solution that could deliver quick results at a reasonable price. New Relic made its mark straightaway in a proof-of-concept. "We loved the fact that New Relic helped us instantly identify bottlenecks in our operation so that we could take corrective action," says Yannick. "New Relic support was great and we really quickly saw the potential of what we could achieve."

In less than three hours, Yannick and team were able to create a new account and immediately pinpoint areas for improvement in their application easysuite. When New Relic first revealed what was causing the bottlenecks his team had been working on for days, says Yannick, "it was like magic."

The Solware team implemented a number of New Relic products to monitor its entire technology stack. Today, New Relic application performance monitoring (APM) and browser monitoring are used to monitor application performance end-to-end and display the results on a monitoring wall for 60 Solware hotline engineers. This instant visibility supports a quick diagnosis of any reported performance issues, and allows employees in direct contact with customers to quickly see the status of any application.

In addition to New Relic synthetics monitoring, Solware uses mobile monitoring, which provided Yannick and team with another real before-and-after revelation. "When we first introduced our mobile application easytab, we thought that our web portal could deal with this new technology," says Yannick. "How wrong we were! Mobile applications take input from the website and thick clients. Without New Relic mobile, we were only seeing half the problem. Issues just became much clearer and easier to solve once we implemented mobile."

Improved application insights

"Helping our customers faster is just great, but it also gives us more high-level application health trends," says Yannick. "With New Relic, we can drill down and investigate the root cause of a problem. Poor performance on one application does not have the same root cause as poor performance on all applications, for instance. New Relic has given us a brand-new way of zooming in on specific topics and taking corrective action. As a result, our incidents have reduced quite drastically."

Improved insight also helped identify a long-standing issue between the hosting platform and the software code so that this could be addressed. Overall, New Relic has led to better application quality, which in turn results in higher customer satisfaction.

Solware is developing a next-generation version of its automotive application and New Relic will be at the heart of its technology stack. Yannick concludes: "Our objective was always to improve the understanding of our infrastructure so that we can respond faster and more proactively when issues arise. Without New Relic, we could not have scaled to the number of easysuite customers we support today and would instead have needed to increase our team by at least three new members, with significant cost ramifications. The partnership with New Relic is fantastic and we love seeing our change requests translate into new features—proof that New Relic takes its customers’ satisfaction as seriously as we take ours."