What moves our customers? We have taken a critical look at your questions as part of our regularly conducted survey of the NPS (Net Promoter Score - a key figure that provides information about the satisfaction of our customers) and now provide you with answers here. Tip: Our CPO Matthias Zürrer gives you interesting insights into the updates and developments of recent months in Product News Part I and Part II.
Banks frequently roll out their updates in the fall. This sometimes leads to disturbances. Although testing is carried thoroughly by both sides, it may still occur that the live system behaves differently from the test system. However, this year, we have unfortunately seen a definite increase in the number of incidents.
We are doing two things to mitigate this in future: Firstly, in 2021 we completely overhauled all our interfaces to the banks. This was mainly to ensure that connections were more stable, improve the data quality of transactions and be ready for the QR invoices in 2022. Secondly, we have linked up with SIX’s bLink banking platform. This provides us with a connection to various major banks and many cantonal banks. This lets us connect to more banks more easily while maintaining the stability we want.
In general, bexio is faster than ever. We say in general, because on several occasions this year speed became really slow for periods that lasted for a few hours.
One of the reasons for this was the rapid growth that bexio was experiencing. While our infrastructure is absolutely capable of handling high traffic volumes, we have had to make some adjustments on the fly (like doing road works on a freeway) in order to ensure the future stability and security of the system. To do this, we simplified and optimized systems, which in turn caused bexio to slow down on a few occasions.
In 2021, we also invested quite a bit in system monitoring. So, we are now able to quickly identify potential causes of congestion, rather like monitoring the flow of road traffic, if we stay with this analogy.
It’s true that in the past, we announced improvements from time to time, which were then not rolled out or rolled out only much later. The reason for this is again due to our rapid growth, which has demanded a lot of effort and the software architecture was not able to keep pace with the expansion. In other words, the software grew organically and became increasingly complex to maintain. This slowed us down considerably at various times, especially since we also had to maintain ongoing operations.
We have learned from this that we have to proceed in much smaller steps than originally thought.
In 2021, we modernized the technology of large parts of what is by far our oldest module: Contact Management. This was urgently needed to enable us to make upgrades (for example an improvement to the import function) and it also served us as a "proof of concept" to see if a step-by-step redesign approach would work. It took a little longer than expected, but, on balance, it worked out well. We're now able to make changes quickly with the modernized parts of the software and roll them out quickly after QA acceptance.
The apps in the marketplace are almost exclusively programmed by partners. If we see that an app can potentially be useful for other bexio customers, we add it to the marketplace after a review. We see this as a good opportunity to offer solutions to our customers that may not fit into bexio's core functions or only may only serve specific user segments.
If there are serious bugs in the system, we treat them with the highest priority. For us, a serious bug is one which affects many customers and prevents them from working with bexio. If such an error occurs, it is corrected immediately; in such cases we communicate via the usual channels, for example in-app or via bexio-status.com. From time to time, unfortunately, an error may occur that only affects a few customers. Even in these cases, we try to do everything we can to fix these errors as quickly as possible. But it is not always possible to fix an error immediately, there are often many factors in play. However, we try to maintain a regular, open exchange of communications with the impacted customers.
Some customers were affected by a behavior in the new purchasing module that blocked certain documents. When this occurred, although the underlying problem was found, the situation itself had to be analyzed and resolved on a case-by-case basis, which has led to long delays even for a comparatively small number of affected users
Business processes are often somewhat complex and vary from business unit to business unit. Financial accounting and VAT are not complicated per se, but as is often the case, the devil is in the detail. Therefore, it is important that bexio (like any other business software) is set up correctly, the VAT settings are made correctly, the chart of accounts is optimized for your business, and so on. Only then can a business software work as expected. We cannot make these decisions for you. However, we have detailed guides, videos, Academy and free webinars to help you get started with bexio the right way. Basically, though, we definitely recommend that you avail of the services of a trustee and invite them to bexio.
Some processes are already fairly well automated, if you take for example the large number of entries that are made for you, the automatic VAT calculation or the bank transactions that are automatically reconciled with invoices. But we still see a lot of potential, especially in the area of document recognition and data extraction. In these areas, however, we want to build on a solid foundation, especially since many of these automated processes are susceptible to user error, simply because so much is done in the background. There are already some good marketplace apps that automate processes. It may well be that in the coming years we will add functions to the core product that have proven to work well.
Most of all, we want to remain an easy-to-use standard software solution. Every customization option also has the potential to complicate things. In each case, we have to weigh up what is the best solution for the vast majority of users.
