Speaking at the recent Wraps, Platforms and Masterfunds Conference, MYOB chief executive Tim Reed told delegates that businesses using MYOB payroll make up about a third of the payroll that gets done in Australia, while about 50 per cent of tax returns lodged with the Australian Taxation Office are lodged using MYOB software.
Asked by panel moderator, BT’s head of platforms Kelly Power, how a business looks to maintain that sort of market dominance and deal with new competitors in the marketplace, Mr Reed replied, “I heard you in the last panel say ‘The instant that you’re not focused on your customers, you do become marginalised’, and that’s absolutely the case in our market.”
MYOB had an effective duopoly for around 20 years before more nimble online start-ups began appearing, who managed to tempt the market with more basic products that didn’t really measure up to established players but started to get a foothold, he said.
“North of 40 per cent of new businesses coming to us today are signing up directly for a cloud-based product, and if we hadn’t put those cloud-based products out in the market when we did, half of our market share probably would have gone,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s our brand that has kept us there; I think it is the investment in new technology and the innovation that we’ve brought to market that has allowed us to maintain that.”
Mr Reed said MYOB also implements customer segmentation models so it knows the types of customers it has. “We spend time with each of our customer segments and we make sure that we’ve got representative clients that we’re representing with,” he said.
The group also performs high level surveys, as well as net-promoter score surveys going out every single day to people who have interacted with MYOB to try to get immediate feedback, he said.
“We do online forums where we discuss topics with a number of businesses and we’re really looking for the words that they choose to describe a situation, such that when we put out marketing messages, we can use words that they are comfortable with," he said.
Ozforex head of strategic sales Tino Ho said having a web-based platform for more than 10 years had proven beneficial because the company did not have to deal with shifting between technologies.
Multi-platform capability means Ozforex can interface with third party platforms, he added: “For us, it’s about partnering with third parties rather than competing against them, and using our smart technology to … deliver an efficient solution and quickly on the one platform.”
Third party partnerships also serve as a major acquisition channel for the group, Mr Ho added.
Mr Ho stressed that with users interacting via multiple online portals including smartphones, tablets and PCs, businesses need to work on maintaining functionality across devices.
Responsive web design is a technique that allows the layout to adapt to the user’s environment, and Ozforex has taken steps towards implementing the strategy, he added.
Social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook are also an important channel for Ozforex in terms of customer feedback because it is instant, live feedback, Mr Ho said.
“It’s also public, so I think you’ve got to be fairly delicate and careful in dealing with it. You’ve also got to be fairly honest and fairly quick to respond to that, but that’s a fairly important channel for us to receive customer feedback,” he added.
