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This is an excerpt from the Abridged Mind Blog site which makes some interesting insights into the churn rate and disatisfaction rates of Netsuite customers. I’ve found if you simply google “netsuite sucks” you can find a large number of hits compared to competitive products
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Nice quarter announced yesterday by NetSuite. Fourth quarter revenues increased by 57%, with full year revenues up 62%. It all looked great until I read the customer number. Over the last 5 years this company has lost more customers than it has been able to add.
This is one of those things that just failed to register the first time I saw it. In scanning the company’s S-1 filing with the SEC there is a note that the customer base was “over 5,400″. That should have caught my eye. It didn’t. But today, reading the earnings press release I saw the company added 432 customers during Q4, bringing the customer count to “over 5,600″. Interesting. I would not have expected it to be 5,832 as there has to be some churn in this business. But what does it say when your rate of churn is about half of your customer add rate?
This serves to validate the discontentment that is captured in the comments following these two blog posts by Dennis Howlett.
NetSuite nightmares – Sept 27, 2007. Comments
NetSuite nightmares: part deux – Jan 10, 2008. Comments
In light of this dissatisfaction the customer add issues make sense. And by the way, it’s much worse than this most recent quarter indicates. Take a look at this press release on the NetSuite website. That’s a release from March of 2003 which boasts that the company had surpassed 6,000 customers. Do you mean to tell me that all of the customer adds you could muster over the last 4-3/4 years have not been enough to offset the churn in your existing customer base? That’s incredible.
Tags: ct, mas200, mas90, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, navision, netsuite, nj, ny, SAP Business One
Although the company chooses to not disclose the information, Netsuite's customer turnover is no secret. With their head burried in the sand, the company fails to remedy the situation and by almost all social media accounts the problem is getting worse. Anyone who google's "netsuite sucks" or similar text will find countless stories of upset customers or chronicles of scarry history. Check out http://www.erpblogger.com/netsuite-customerloss.h... Netsuite is interested in one thing – revenue growth – and shows no mercy in constant price escalations and the SaaS industry's worst customer support..
Mike, your URL seems invalid.
I'm high ranking person at a company that has used Netstuite for 4 years (our company can't move away from it = straight-jacket-ware). Before you select this software for your company, review some of the following concepts:
- It should say a lot that you have to go through their website to log into YOUR software.
- Their interface is painfully difficult to deal with – just ask them to show you how to enter an Event…pay special attention to the Attendees portion. Oh sure, you can drag and drop some stuff around (Portlets) on your Home page, but when you really want to start using it for reporting, etc., you will find it VERY difficult to get it to do what you want. Before you buy, ask them to replicate the format of your current financial reports.
- The Microsoft Outlook integration tool is a small feature for some. In 5 years they are on Version 2 (Beta). I'm not really sure where to begin (no Boolean filters, no consideration of the Blackberry, implementation disaster) but if you want a quick summary of how bad the app is, take a look at what it does to the forms in Outlook…the only field it adds to forms such as Contact is company and it overlaps the field in the UI. Needless to say – it should say a lot that there is no Blackberry support (even the third party company that makes an app admits that its too difficult to make a successful app…but they're happy to show you the Salesforce app).
- Try calling their support line before you buy – just ask them to help with something simple, like how to monitor an email blast. You will find that their support staff is very under-qualified to help with anything related to computers. Here's my favorite one – if you find a major bug that is killing your business, the support staff will, AT BEST, enter a bug report with no guarantee of a follow up…seriously, I have more than a dozen SIMPLE REQUESTS that have not been followed up on in 4 YEARS!!!
- Email Campaign. Let's just say that when you call support for help with this and you ask for help with simple things like, where can I see the status of outbound email, you will eventually have someone tell you that this is not CRM software.
- Project Management. Not sure where to start here…simple thing, show me where I can see a simple view of the profitability of a project. Oh, they'll show you something but it doesn't work…trust me.
- Implementation support. This is probably the most important thing to consider – If you are 5 to 75 employees, be prepared to spend 30k to 50k per year in consulting fees to a reputable Netsuite consulting firm. Otherwise, you will kill yourself trying to make the software do what you expect it to do. If you are a bigger company, why are you going with netsuite?
FWIW, I've been using it for 4 years and am a very competent computer user. I didn't just get frustrated yesterday…it's been frustrating since day one. Not at them, but at myself for believing that netsuite would live up to any obligation that a SAAS company should have in order to be progressive and put money, smarts and development behind their product. The comedy now is watching the fact that even though we give them $75k/year in licencing, we can't get a sales person to call us back FOR MONTHS AT A TIME!!!!!!!!
I hope this helps someone.
My God…I have stumbled upon the bane of my existence in Netsuite. It is absolute tripe. It seems that they’ve decided to make it as cumbersome and unintuitive as humanly possible. Not only that…it never does what you want it to do. Did they even attempt User Acceptance Testing or just threw it on the market?