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Comment by z9znz | Hacker News Reader

As a business email hosting customer, I have been very happy with Zoho for years. And on the rare occasion that I needed customer support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to almost every other tech company I depend on. Not only that, the pricing is very reasonable.

It's funny that in the tech world, providing a reliable service at a reasonable price for two decades (and with actual human customer service) is contrarian. I realize that's not the point of the article, but it does apply.

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I have realized that you can take just about any SaaS company, no matter how saturated, and build a great product and overdeliver on customer service and succeed.

Hard to do obviously but you don’t need to strike gold on some new ideas or category.

Virtually every industry has some parallel "higher touch luxury version".

For a lot of industries, it seems like the existing players are able to service both markets. You've got the classic splits like "Toyota vs. Lexus" or where the same supermarket chain owns both the bougie foodie/organic brand and the ghetto brand.

In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much. There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support. Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.

It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA. I wonder if it's due to a complete fixation on "we'll AI and algorithm as many people out of the process out to pursue higher margins and better scale", to the point they don't even recognize the premium market as worth pursuing. It could be that "we're not interested in a business that isn't a billion dollars/bajillion percent growth rate", even if it offers high margins/stickiness.

A more sinister thought might be that by deliberately discarding an "uninteresting" market, they can feign that their position is weaker when market-competition regulators come to town.

> In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much.

Yes, we have.

> There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support

Google Workspace and AWS each have their own multi-level (3 for Google Workspace, 4 for AWS) progressive scale of how high-touch they are. (For Workspace, which also has product feature tiers, this is a separate axis of differentiation.)

This is quite common in software and online services.

> Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.

Just as Toyota having Lexus and Honda having Acura doesn’t squeeze out McLaren, there’s space in tech for standalone high-touch brands. But, yeah, the big names high-touch offerings are probably doing orders of magnitude more business.

> It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA

No, the difference is that, sincs its not a consumer but a B2B product, the high-touch version from a mass vendor is just differentiated by being high touch, not be having an entirely separate brand identity despite being the same vendor. In fact, the brand identity is kept because the ability to move up seemlessly as business needs evolve is a selling point.

>And on the rare occasion that I needed customer support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to almost every other tech company I depend on.

That's amazing, especially given that this is an Indian company, and "Indian customer service" is known throughout the English-speaking developed world as being terrible.

My Google Apps account does all I need for now, but I've heard enough good things about Zoho from you and others recently that it will be on the list of alternatives to check out.

+1 here.

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