Jeff Brown – June 5, 2019 – I’ve spent a lifetime working in the financial technology space, with most of my career in the payments industry. Over time, I’ve worked in the largest companies in payments, as well as a few startups and in-between. For nearly three decades, I’ve seen many technological advances, and I’ve seen just as many well-intentioned efforts stymied in the marketplace. The more I see, the more I’ve come to believe that there are a few common denominators that all successful developers share.
As we were looking to integrate SaaS technology with our payments platform early on at Celero, I was struck by one team in particular, the people at RazorSync, and how they seemed to share those common denominators I’d seen in successful developers before: their ability to empathize with their customer, their success at developing versatile software, and the fact that they were intelligent to know that you can be both simple and sophisticated.
Empathy
When people develop intuitive technologies—the ones where you almost don’t need a manual or much instruction to figure out on your own—it’s because they are empathetic; they understand the customer. They can easily slip into their user’s shoes, know their needs, and meet those needs.
You can tell when you navigate RazorSync, that while it doesn’t offer something for everybody, it’s definitely everything for the field service business. That person generally is working in a traditionally less sophisticated space, one where too many contractors have worked as sole proprietors without their personal liability protected, and one where checks and cash—with their attendant risk—dominate. It is also an industry where its customers prefer to use credit cards in order to enjoy the rewards and benefits that come with charging larger purchases and earning points, air miles, and rebates.
RazorSync is aimed squarely at these folks, enabling them to take one-person operations to legitimate businesses, and enabling owners who may have multiple trucks in the field achieve greater growth, faster—one of our core values at Celero. The team has built RazorSync to address the three areas where field service business owners typically need the most help: managing finances, scaling operationally in the wildcard environment of travelling from home to home, business to business every day, and getting paid.
RazorSync meets the business owner where they are, delivering a one-stop solution set right out of the box.
Versatility
The best applications are versatile. While they don’t try to solve all of the world’s problems, elite solutions choose their targets and meet as many of their needs as possible. A good example of this dynamic is LinkedIn. Some of us use it for networking, others for sourcing sales leads, and still others for finding good hires or being found. Some use it for all of those things, but many pick and choose capabilities as they need them.
RazorSync is just such a solution, addressing disparate, yet shared pain points like accounting integration, estimating, invoicing, routing and logistics, payroll, employee tracking, and customer management. A true all-in-one solution for the HVAC company, the plumber, electrician, or landscaper, RazorSync is focused on overcoming the challenges that these types of companies face every day.
Simplicity
While we like our technology to solve a sophisticated array of challenges, we also need it to be user-friendly. I know most people, if faced with a trade-off, would choose fewer capabilities if it meant an app was easier to use. This is a quite logical conclusion, as what good are features if you don’t understand how to use them!
Customer after customer has shared with us what a great impact RazorSync has had on their field service business. Many have reported increased profitability immediately, as well as greater efficiency across all of their operations. They chalk up this immediate success—again, we want them to grow and do it faster—to an easy-to-use and understand interface, as well as superior customer service. While many developers want to create software, seemingly few want to actually support it. The RazorSync team is comprised of people after our own heart. While they certainly create truly great business software, they are equally committed to the human side of the business, caring for customers with great compassion, knowing that customer downtime in a field service operation means loss of revenue with immediate effect.
The RazorSync team provides Celero with an opportunity to be unique among integrated commerce companies built on a payment’s platform coupled with SaaS solutions and supported with business intelligence tools. We have our own technology development team at RazorSync, studying the unique business needs of new verticals, so that we can bring software to market that helps them better accomplish their respective missions.
Stay tuned as we continue to distribute all-in-one solutions like RazorSync to our customers directly, via our financial institution partners, and integrated with other products.