We are all familiar with the concept of cost v’s quality and as one goes up the other goes down. So how does that work for all those suppliers offering “highest quality and lowest price”.
The rational amongst us know it can’t be true. But we’ve become a slave to the cheapest price concept, and faced with a cost saving, we lose all rationality.
In our industry the cost of building an SMS platform can vary enormously. You can enter the market with a single server hosted in your bedroom, support it yourself via email or mobile phone, and if your server dies get yourself to PC World sharpish, and in the meantime your customers are buggered.
At the other end of the scale you can build a multisite secure platform linked via lease lines with numerous backup systems in data centres that are not on flood plains. Support provided by multiple customer support staff, and a technical team on call 24/7 doing regular performance checks.
It’s unlikely a top end SMS provider will offer the cheapest prices as they need to cover the cost of their infrastructure, likewise it’s unlikely the low cost providers will be able to afford to upgrade their platform.
It comes down to cost v’s quality and where on the curve you want to operate at.
What prompted this post?
Some of our competitors regularly beats us on price, we always try and justify our prices by reference to the level of infrastructure and support we provide, but the lure of low prices is often too great for some.
One competitor recently suffered a significant system failure, I wonder how many of their customers ‘accept’ the problems as part of the low pricing, or were they jumping up and down, I suspect the latter.
My advice (if you want it) is two part:
- Decide where you want to be on the cost v’s quality line and find a supplier that matches up.
- Remember that quality cannot be measured on a single item, you need to look at the complete package offered. In our industry this is not just network connections, but also failover and backup systems, customer support, financial health, and technical expertise.