I am continuing with a third Balanced Scorecard software selection question that can save millions. I hope you will find it interesting. This time it is about customer references.
Who are your non-reference customers and why?
Background to the question
When you ask for references, normally software companies showcase only their success stories. Most of them would have just begun using the software without having a long enough experience with it. Just think of it yourself – if you have committed millions of dollars, would you say that you made a bad choice if you did choose the wrong vendor? Most probably not. So instead of asking just for references, you should ask for non-reference customers. That is those customers who are not on their ready-reference list.
How to test the software vendor
If they don’t want to give you their non-reference customer list, you can go on this web page and check the historical internet archive – waybackmachine – https://www.archive.org. This web page caches most of the web pages and you can go and check out the software company’s historical web pages. For eg., go back 4 years and look at the references on their web page and ask if it is still a customer? In most cases, you will find out that the initiative has died or the software is not used.
