Kindly share your feedback on how Goodfirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
Goodfirms has been good in bringing qualitative visibility to technology and marketing brands. They help bridge gaps between solution seekers and providers and are doing a great job at it.
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
I and Gaurav Sabharwal founded Saffron Tech back in 2008 here in India to create a complete Technology (application development) and Digital Marketing solutions company offering our services primarily in North America. As times changed we realized we needed a physical presence in the US to help penetrate the market better and gain the confidence of businesses by showcasing a local presence. This led us to create Saffron Edge in New Jersey in 2017. With the second company in place, we were able to dedicate both our brands to 2 of our main service offerings - Technology and Marketing.
Presently, Saffron Tech revolves around offering 360-degree product engineering and technology solutions to our clients and Saffron Edge offers digital transformation solutions to all businesses of all leading industry verticals. Saffron Edge also specializes in DTC and Growth Marketing initiatives that make us stand out from our competitors who are offering traditional digital marketing solutions.
What is the story behind starting this company?
I always enjoyed the world of technology and the productization of digital goods from a very young age. I was fascinated by the likes of Steve Jobs, who’ve inspired me to innovate and create unique solutions to problems. This passion kind of drove me as I grew up and during my graduation and post-graduation in London, I was exposed to a vast amount of knowledge and ideas from peers, colleagues, and companies that I worked with.
This led me to ideate and partner up with Gaurav, who had a similar journey and vision. So, together we laid the foundation of Saffron Tech with the aspiration of creating innovative solutions to business problems that would help them grow. We knew the market and we knew our core capabilities, we just needed a team of passionate people with whom we could grow. And here we are today!
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We have always hired the best resources out there and created teams from the ground up. Our core operations still revolve around housing a team of over 120-150 employees across both offices in India and the US. However, there have been projects that require specialists from fields that are not a core part of our service offerings. In these special cases, we do have a wide network of vendors who lend their expertise to the projects with proper sign-offs and approvals from the client, vendor, and ourselves.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
I believe our core philosophies and approach set us apart when it comes to project understanding and execution. We are intertwined between technology and marketing; that's what makes us different. Having both is quite powerful when it comes to creativity and the execution of projects we work on. The kind of value our end customers get because of both these areas is extremely beneficial. In terms of service offerings, we keep evolving our services to stay up to date with the latest trends in the world of marketing and technology. Our experience of having witnessed the transition of online products, portals, search engines, and marketing tactics over the years also gives us an edge to offer realistic goals and results that are measurable and scalable. We also take pride in our post-sales success where we have deployed dedicated client success representatives who ensure that the client always feels comfortable and see the value of the work that we do for them during their course of engagement with us.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
We have started creating our focus groups around eCommerce brands, alternate proteins, and fairtrade brands as they have tremendous potential for scalability and growth with a global consumer base. We also specialize in marketing for Legal, and Medical industry clientele, and as you probably would see some great results that we were able to achieve for our clients in these industries.
Being in the service industry I’d say most of our customers in the marketing segment are repetitive. We have a 95% retention rate of successfully keeping our customers engaged with us for years.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
For Digital marketing services we are quite respectfully known for organic search, paid marketing, Social media, and Direct to consumer solutions. The clients who come to us have an idea for a tech project and we provide consultative solutions for them through our in-depth experience. Technology which we are great at is Microsoft azure and application development in .net.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
Our NPS shows a score of 4.2 out of 5 and we take immense pride in having an over 95% customer retention rate. We are a very customer success-driven company and value relationships as much as the results that we deliver. Besides doing phenomenal work in execution, our client success representatives are trained to keep regular checks with our customers to ensure there are minimal escalations of lapse in communication during a project. We also have anonymous feedback and NPS systems in place that encourage our customers to leave detailed feedback and scores that we review and take necessary steps to learn and improve from.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We have a variety of homegrown and commonly used project management and communication interfaces such as Kore, Slack, Trello, Teams where we manage most of our projects. Besides these our client-facing teams have access to Zoom, MS Teams, Skype, phone, and emails that they use at their discretion as per the needs of the client. Our own applications support all the processes and functions at Saffron for our services to be efficient.
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.)
For Marketing Services we mostly have a contractual or monthly cost structure that is charged in advance. For Technology projects, we offer milestones, dedicated teams, and phase-driven payment options since technology projects tend to have more cost involved and we want to make it easy for our clients to have easy-to-pay options as the project accomplishes the agreed-upon milestones.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
We don't believe in a package-based model of services. We like to go into the details of a project, understand the business goals, challenges and expectations before putting together a marketing plan that would help them achieve their goals. However, we do have to consider the clients’ budget, as any form of marketing or technology endeavor requires patience and time to deliver quality and success and limited budgets don’t help. Most of our marketing solutions start around $1.5 USD per month onwards.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2020?
2020 has been a strange year with the pandemic and global impacts all around. So in 2020 we also extended ourselves just like any business out there to help clients through the tough times and gave relaxations in price points wherever we could. But in general, If I look at 2018 or 2019 data, I would say we have delivered some complex technology projects of 200K USD. Minimums are hard to scope for technology since it's mostly scope-driven. In marketing our average price range has been between 3K to 25K USD per month for projects.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
We wish to have a more global presence and want to expand our teams and capability to be able to offer our solutions globally. We want to establish ourselves as the leading MarTech solutions provider out there that can transform businesses of any shape, scale, and size. The key focus would remain towards DTC.
