Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
GoodFirms has been embarking our visibility among potential clients. As a brand GoodFirms works as a bridge of trust between clients and IT service providers. It’s very difficult for a person to trust professionals who are sitting at remote locations and wish to work for them so there are intermediaries required to verify the service providers on their behalf. Especially small companies like us face the wrath of losing business due to lack of trust in our brand. The brand recognition and listing opportunities offered by GoodFirms are a boon for clients and organizations which offer their software development services remotely.
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
Decipher Zone Technologies is a custom web application and Java development company that works as an application development partner for start-ups and business partner for IT services multinational companies. Over the passage of time, I have served as CEO, Director, Project manager & Senior Full Stack Developer in Decipher Zone Technologies since the birth of this company.
What is the story behind starting this company?
Decipher Zone Technologies was started back in 2015 as a garage company by Lalit Sharma, Raja D. Vashistha, Shrikant Sharma, and a couple of friends. A bunch of guys who were thwarted with lousy IT solutions being produced by the industry and decided to cull the herd. Our endeavor to deliver high-quality IT solutions led us to do a SWOT analysis before proceeding ahead. We realized that our peers are not getting the anticipated results even though they have a skillful workforce, so we decided to adopt the strict code of conduct in development therefore we are implementing projects with technologies that would provide a high level of abstraction with blazing fast performance. Since then, my core motive was to deliver clients the high-quality code that has been developed from a template to a complete software application to eliminate compatibility issues on all fronts.
What are your company’s business model–in-house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
Currently, the business model is Outsourcing for our business partners.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Companies are usually business domain-specific whereas we are technology-specific while picking up the projects. In contrast to our competition, we do not pick projects on a diversified tech stack, instead try to work around our niche which is java development and web app development. For the frontend, we majorly focus on Angular, React Js, and some charting libraries. We adapt highly-scalable architectures, use design patterns according to requirements and the latest technologies for a high level of abstraction packed with performance.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
As I have already mentioned earlier, we aren’t limited to specific industries so we cater to all of them. Yes, our customers are repetitive with 7 out to 10 being the repeat customers. The ones who left us are usually start-ups who have grown big enough to hire their own in-house development teams.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
The software development in Decipher Zone is a little more skewed towards web application development. In terms of the tech stack, we work on Java (Spring, Groovy, Grails, Play, Blade, Struts, GWT, Spark), Angular, React Js, Vue Js, D3 Js, Canvas Js, and many more.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
First, I would like to emphasize the fact that software development is an enormously typical process with tons of nitty grittiness so it’s almost impossible to have a customer satisfaction rate beyond 90%. Although our customer satisfaction rate is 80%, I consider it as equivalent to our repetitive customer rate i.e., 70% because one can be generous while providing ratings but not with the money for your work.
If a customer turns out to be unsatisfied with our work then our business team conducts a discussion with them to do the root cause analysis and later on moves this conversation to a mutual agreement where both parties find themselves satisfied. After the mutual agreement if some work is required by the development team then they implement it and the results of root cause analysis are shared with the top management. Such results work out as a motivating factor to bring new tools and processes to the working culture of the company by core leadership in the following weeks.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
Every customer who has ever come to us has an onboarding call with the CEO and later on, they are referred to their point of contact in their hired development team. The customers can email, call, or WhatsApp on companies’ official contact references and he/she will get a response within 24 hours. In case they still don’t get any response, then they can contact the CEO.
We are happy to discuss and resolve the queries, issues of our customers at any point in time. If you aren’t satisfied with the response from your point of contact then your meetings can be arranged with the top management too.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We work on all the above-mentioned models but the most preferred ones by our customers are pay per hour, week and months. The reason behind this choice is that they have been working with us on their products from the initial stage of product development and the demand for features by their customers grows exponentially as they start entering the product growth phase.
We have predefined pricing brackets for different types of developers whose per-hour prices keep on increasing with the level of experience they have. The complexity of the project will demand a team and time to implement the whole project so we allocate the required team and multiply the cost of their service to the total hours required to develop the whole project.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If not, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
Yes, we only take in projects which meet our basic budget requirements. The minimum requirement for us to even evaluate the project requirements is $5000.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2020?
The minimum amount of project that we catered to in 2020 was a fixed price project of $10000 and the maximum was $2000000 per year where billing was done on pay per hour basis.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
10 years is significantly a very long time in the software industry where companies experience hyper-growth and fall within a small time. Although I am not sure where we would be exactly after 10 years I am certain that in the following 5 years we will be expanding ourselves by introducing a product range in the market.