ForeSoft Blog

ForeSoft never sleeps

When we say that we offer 24/7 customer support, we really mean that.

After getting an immediate response either sometime after a midnight or during a weekend, our customers keep asking us:”do you guys ever sleep?”

ForeSoft never sleeps. We are always here to serve you.

Of course, our servers are always available and responsive (they are called “hardware” anyway ;-) and it doesn’t surprise our customers as much as around-the-clock customer support does). How could we really cover 24/7 while providing you with the highest level of expertise around the clock? Well, sure we are working long hours and don’t sleep much ;-), we are always assigning primary-on-call guys to cover weekends and holidays, but, of course it won’t be enough. We also have a part of the support team in Europe, who are in the same time zone as our numerous European and Asian customers.

All of our customers: from Europe to the US; from New Zealand to Japan; from South Africa to Australia are getting immediate help right when they need it. Our customers got used to it and they don’t expect anything less from ForeSoft. Your business cannot be placed on hold when there is a problem. That is why, day in and day out, ForeSoft people are here for you, providing the responsive and knowledgeable support necessary to solve your problems.

More transparency, reliability and trust

In general, hosted services reliability is pretty high these days, as each SaaS company strives to provide the most stable and reliable services in the industry, but is it any way to know how exactly reliable the service is?

As any SaaS – oriented company, we had a number of customers with mission-critical businesses who were really concerned about their SLA, since their performance depends on our service stability. We usually responded that our service reliability is close to 100%, we also kept mentioning all that redundancy and stuff, but finally we decided to let the numbers talk for themselves.

As a result, we now offer a System Status web page that shows all the statistical information about system uptime and displays all the system outages detailed information. The screen is refreshed in a real time, so it always shows an up-to-date information. We hope, this tool will proof quite useful as it would help our customers to ease concerns about meeting their SLA’s for their mission-critical services.

Idea Exchange

No matter how flexible and customizable our products are, no matter how well designed their generic core is, there are always some customers who are still missing some functionality. We always listen to our customers, and we’ve implemented hundreds of customer requests, however, as the system vendors, we have to manage core system functionality. We keep getting requests from other customers to add some functionality to match their unique business needs, however we are not always able to add all these hundreds of new features to the core system as it would become overloaded and the user interface wouldn't be as clean and straightforward as it is now. That’s what our customers love our products for after all. Each time we add new functionality, we try to make sure that it would benefit all the customers and also would become an integral part of the product workflow.

That's why we created an Idea Exchange - to give our customers a space to communicate and discuss each-others ideas, promote and comment on existing ideas and add own creative ideas.

All the creative ideas are get noticed, commented and promoted by other customers, and this helps us to understand the most desired system functionality. Such understanding, combined with our vision of the global product development strategy, helps us to define our perspective development plan and prioritize development tasks to assign them to subsequent product releases.

ForeSoft Stability

…I recall one customer who really liked BUGtrack back 6 years ago, but didn’t subscribe because she had doubts about our company’s stability. Here is a quote that I found in the really old BUGtrack record: “We hope to use whatever package we choose for many-many years and need a partner who we feel assured will be around in 10 years, with a commitment to this system. To be honest, we do not get that impression. However, the product does meet our needs with exactly the functionality we are looking for. Regards, Betsy J. ”.

Well… ForeSoft continues it’s rapid growth and became one of the leading SaaS providers since that time, however I am not sure that Betsy’s company is still around.

Not just BUGtrack evolved since that time and gained lots of the powerful features, but our services became well-diversified as we heavily invested into a new development. As a result, we launched CRMdesk, TeamDesk and dbFLEX.

All of our products became really popular and rapidly gaining customer base because most of our customers have realized our great potential. Our diversified customer base includes largest Fortune-500 and Blue-Chip companies, such as UPS, JVC, HP, Vodafone and others.

Of course, some companies keep loosing a unique business opportunity as Betsy did back 6 years ago. We are sorry for them, but we have to move forward…

To comply with some companies' policies when it is absolutely necessary to keep the local copy we developed BUGtrack Backup Tool and TeamDesk Backup Tool

Needless to say that we run global databases' backups daily and store them remotely to ensure data safety. Our disaster recovery strategy allows us to survive any unforeseen event without data loss.

Try it before you buy it

Why are we always offering a free trial? Simply because we love our products and we really want to share them with you.
We believe that our systems are so good that you'll become addicted as soon as you try them.
We want you to make sure that your search is over and you finally found the right product and the right company to put your trust in - you simply can't afford to go wrong.
All of our products' free trials are fully-functioning production systems. Not only you may utilize them right away, but you may evaluate system responsiveness and stability as well.

While evaluating TeamDesk, CRMdesk or BUGtrack you'll have to determine whether or not our products quality is equally matched by the quality of customer support.

That's how we work, and we expect nothing less from other companies we are dealing with. What do we think about the company that doesn't offer a free trial? We assume that they are simply afraid of making a bad impression. And we are glad that we are not.

No Outside Investments

I really feel sorry for the VC. Intuitively, they smell a great potential here and keep trying to jump in. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for us, ForeSoft doesn't accept any outside investments. This is one of the fundamental company's principles and it helps to keep the company the way you like it – dynamic, innovative and rapidly growing.

No soliciting, please

If you happen to contact our customer support, you know how friendly these guys are. Of course, they are. You are asking for the support, and that’s what they are here for – to support you.
Since the customer support hotline is the only number we publish, our support department also works as a really effective “firewall” that filters out 100% unsolicited telemarketing calls. All those soliciting and phishing callers, as well as smarties who want to talk to the CEO are directed to submit their requests via email for proper consideration. Skipping non-support – related calls allows the support team to concentrate on urgent support requests and billing inquiries.
Needless to say that an advanced calls screening and anti-spam technology is also in place, and that makes support team’s life easier.

So, what is the best way to get the most effective support? Nobody would give you a better answer than customer support portal creators. Each of our products has its own CRMdesk - based support portal to handle customer requests in the most effective way.

No outsourcing

ForeSoft doesn’t fell for the modern outsourcing trend, and this is a key of the company’s success.

We don’t outsource customer support (not even talking about development), and we’ll never do. All the software is produced in-house, and all the support is provided by ForeSoft employees. As a result, we are able to produce the cutting-edge software and provide the best-in-industry customer support. Another reason why we won’t ever consider outsourcing is security. You put your trust in us, and security of your data is our first priority.

One may think that giving up an outsourcing opportunity we are loosing potential savings. Maybe… But at least we are not loosing quality and as a result, we keep growing rapidly – year after year.

Welcome to the ForeSoft Blog!

Via this blog, we hope to reach out to more of you. We'll let you know our thoughts about ForeSoft, about where we are headed, and show you a little of what goes on "behind the scenes." The blog won't substitute for our online support, knowledge base, and help documentation. However, it will give you a more well-rounded view of the company and the team behind it.