[ChrisMarshallNY]

Good tool, but, as someone mentioned, there are a number of other factors.

1) Brand reinforcement/damage.

This one is really hard to quantify, but can mean the difference between the life, or the death, of the corporation. If the tool we choose causes some damage to the brand (like not giving us the ability to display the brand in an appropriate manner), or introduces a brand-damaging problem (like causing a particular kind of service to have an extra step or two, or even amplify customer pain), then there could be issues.

On the plus side, it could also significantly fortify a brand, by doing things like having the brand appear in places that were disregarded, or considered "out of reach," or it could amplify the advantages of a brand-connected service.

Branding is a "dark art" to many literal-minded folks like engineers, but it is unbelievably valuable. It should always be considered, when thinking about things like this.

This morning, I had this demonstrated to me in a visceral manner. I made an order yesterday, and asked for expedited delivery. When I made the order, it said the expedited delivery would arrive today, but when I received the confirmation, it said the order would arrive tomorrow.

Sound familiar? Amazon is notorious for this nasty little trick. Most of the time, it's Prime Delivery, which means we don't really have much room to complain.

It wasn't Amazon. I won't name the corporation, but it is one that is synonymous with extremely high (arrogant, even) quality.

This silly little trick, with a cheap, third-party item, caused brand damage with a loyal customer that has spent six figures with them. I won't drop them, and the world won't stop turning because I won't get my item until tomorrow, but the simple fact that they did the "shipping bait and switch" on me, means that I'll never use them again for this kind of purchase.

That's brand damage.

To add insult to injury, when I tried contacting them about it, I had to run the gauntlet of what I call the "AI Picador," which throws as many roadblocks as possible in your path, before allowing connection to a human.

This workflow ensures that I will be steaming mad before I get to the human, and it's all I can do to avoid venting to them (it isn't their fault -it's their bosses').

2) Staff morale.

Will bringing in the service reinforce or damage staff morale? It may help folks do their jobs a lot easier (good), or it may result in a lot of folks losing their jobs (bad, or very bad, depending on many factors, like how the layoffs are done, and how the folks that remain are treated).

3) Dependence/Addiction

If bringing in a dependency ties us to a corporation/language/toolset, is that good or bad? It may be quite good, if it's a good service, and a good corporation, but it could also be incredibly bad.

[notahacker]

If you're big enough for your brand image to be damaged by your bug reporting tool, customer analytics or payment flow having a third party logo, you're probably more in the realms of paying for the enterprise grade white labelling offering than 'are ten seats worth the money' anyway. Of course you can definitely wreck your sales with spammy use of email automation tools or evasive customer service, but that's more to do with how tools are used than the third party involvement.

And if SaaS is valuable enough to actually replace staff you've outgrown the simple decision making aid too, although I agree that you can dent morale at the margin by introducing SaaS oriented towards micromanagement or somewhat improve it with less crappy processes even with the simplest of software changes.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

For smaller organizations, the "plus" could outweigh the "minus."

For example, if the "beancounter" calculation says that the SaaS tool is "not worth it," but bringing it in might significantly project the brand, then it may be worth it, in a big way.

Same with advertising, but advertising is a bit easier to measure (after the fact, as opposed to before). Brand value is really difficult to measure in any kind of empirical manner.

But a bug reporting tool, if exposed to customers, is a very important branding surface.

Error handling/reporting is a huge deal that is often neglected by tech folks. For many of us, a console print or log entry may be quite sufficient, but for an end user, they may need a lot more HI.

I've encountered some ghastly bug reporting tools that were obviously designed by techs, for techs.