Small and mid-size businesses don’t have the luxury to compete with large enterprises on products and services on pricing alone. Those who tried could not sustain this for long. So, they usually take their battles to the grounds of other equally important aspects of the business like price, after-sales support, quality of service, ease of use, etc. However, price continues to remain a significant decision criterion for buying any product or service from a customer’s perspective. The businesses very well know that and try their best not to create an apples-to-apples comparison of prices between their products/services and the competitors’. This becomes very difficult in commoditized services where there is not much value that can be added to the product itself.
Price is of course related to the cost of offering the product or service to a customer. To make a product or service more attractive to a customer, one can reduce the price of its offering by reducing its profit margin or reducing its overall cost of production. Reducing the margin only has a short-term impact as the overall reduction in profitability starts to hit other parts of the business – sometimes even on the quality of what’s delivered to customers. Spikes, if any, in sales due to reduced prices by cutting down on margins are due to customers who care primarily about price and will soon switch to any other vendor who can offer a lower price. So, not much is gained by acquiring such customers through lower prices.
So, it appears that what every company must strive for is reduced cost of production with increased addition of value to its products and services. On the face of it, this appears contradictory since adding value can’t come in at additional cost. And as soon as cost goes up margin reduces, or prices increases. What a conundrum to deal with! But that’s what differentiates successful businesses from the not-so-successful ones. They can do both – add value and reduce cost.
Data stream management has generated lots of interest for businesses as the cost, volume, and value of data-driven outcomes are steeply increasing in the world. Acquiring, transforming, cleansing, validating, enhancing, analyzing, and actioning data from multiple sources in a smart, scalable and cost-effective manner remains a challenge for businesses. Simultaneously, prices of such services offered by the dominant service providers have continued to go up in a linear fashion without necessarily adding near proportionate value to the customers. There are vendors who have been charging their customers tens of thousands of dollars every month for several years now, to manage streams of data that easily exceed the cost of a smartly created solution by at least 75%. Further, the solutions built by them ages ago are ‘one-fits-all’ that painfully force fits solutions into customers’ business needs requiring the businesses to spend extra dollars on giving those finishing touches. Solutions created by these legacy incumbent vendors are built on such outdated technologies that are so inflexible that even if they wish to, they would not be able to accommodate most of the requests from the customer for changes.
At Bydek, we have always put the horse before the cart. We respect the fact that the customers’ business needs are unique, and each customer requires as much attention to their problems as a doctor would pay to each patient even if most of the patients might show the same symptoms.
We understand, document, and paraphrase the customer's needs very carefully before jumping on to solving a problem. Half the battle is already won there! This is significant also because it impacts our cost of delivery. Our unique model of delivery allows us to not reinvent the wheel for every customer and still allow for so much flexibility inbuilt into the solution that the customer always feels that the solution was custom-made for them. While as a young yet steadily growing business we have tough financial goals, we do not compromise on the one goal that helps achieve all the rest – Customer Satisfaction. And yes, did I say our customers do care for the price they pay?
