Setter : Reduced SAAS costs by more than $10,000 USD per month and aggregated voice, text, email and in-app messages onto a single platform

Services: Front End / Timeline: 6 months / Location: United States

 

Overview

Setter is a virtual home checkup tool that makes cumbersome home tasks and management services simple.

They rapidly outgrew parts of their tech stack as the business evolved. SSG helped unify their communication threads across multiple channels, reducing SAAS costs in the process.

 

The Challenge

To offer exceptional, white-glove service, Setter interacts with homeowners across various messaging channels, including email, in-app messages, SMS, and voice. It really is like having your own concierge who knows you and your home.

As Setter experienced rapid growth, it became increasingly difficult for Setter’s growing ops team to handle more and more users while keeping track of information across several different mediums. Furthermore, SAAS costs from retaining multiple messaging services quickly added up.

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How did we help Setter retain a high-touch, concierge-level service for its users, while improving efficiency of its ops team across all messaging mediums? How did we do this while reducing SAAS costs by $10,000 USD per month?

The Process

 
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Does it make dollars?
Does it make cents?

We built a business case around which SAAS services could be removed and discovered that, if we leveraged some of our existing background IP, the ROI on our work could be recuperated by Setter within 6 months. Within a 18 months, Setter will have realized $2 in savings for every dollar spent on this revamp. Within 24 months, $3 in savings for every dollar spent. You get the picture.

 
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Standardize the API’s

Setter’s API’s were custom built for every screen, and differed drastically in their “shape”. This created development and maintenance overhead with every single screen, and prevented us from using some of our existing, well-established patterns for rapid development. We’re big fans of the official JSON API Spec, but we’ve also become advocates for GraphQL.

We decided to use GraphQL to interact with Setter’s existing database models, giving us a standardized API across the entire database. This was key to unlocking rapid development of maintainable code.

 
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Leverage Existing Background IP

With years of experience in telecoms, we benefited from domain knowledge with respect to call centers. We already knew the pain points that call center agents have on a daily basis. Also, we happened to have some background IP that was immediately useful.

We wrapped our background IP around custom Node.js microservices to streamline inbound and outbound communications across numerous mediums (i.e. SMS, email, voice, and in-app messages), and a unified the experience for Setter’s Ops team via a single-sign-on, React.js frontend.

The Outcome


ROI on our work could be recuperated by Setter within 6 months. Within a 18 months, Setter will have realized $2 in savings for every dollar spent on this revamp. Within 24 months, $3 in savings for every dollar spent. You get the picture.

GraphQL provided Setter with highly available, performant API’s without external dependencies. This has improved uptime for their Ops team, who deal with mission-critical communications.