What is most important to you in picking a business application?

We at Property Stampede are trying to determine what drives value in a business application. We would like to think that it is our fashionable appearance or our heart warming personalities that creates value for our end users... but we completely understand if you disagree.

The reason we are trying to determine what drives value, is quite simple really, we want to offer the best possible application to our customers as we can. It helps us little if we do not know what makes our customers really excited about our application. Is it a low price, a large feature list, top notch customer service and support? What makes our customers tick?

Can a company provide a large feature list(1), top notch customer service(2), ease of use(3) and high reliability(4) while still offering it at a low price(5)? In comparison, does WalMart offer all of the above? I would venture to say that they have has 1, 4, and 5. Yet they are rated as one of the best in department retail.

Another example is Apple. They definitely do not have 5, ugh... but they are growing and gaining the affection of the younger elitists in our society. Apple has 2 for sure... I was in the store at the genius bar once and a customer came in with an obviously damaged laptop. He even told them that he had slipped on ice and thrown his laptop 10 feet in the air. It still worked but the cd-rom had stopped operating. They replaced the cd-rom for him. Astonishing. I think in total they have 2,3,4, and innovation (I forgot to add that one earlier, we will call it 6).

Is a company silly if they try to go after all of the core aspects of creating value? (There is actually terminology for this stuff, but I do not remember it all...) My personal opinion is that it is impossible for a company to focus on all aspects, and if they do, they never achieve greatness. Our goal is to achieve greatness, if thats the case, then where do we spend our time?

My initial thought was a low price, but I am beginning to rethink that. I think that our product is providing much needed innovation in the terms of property management and searching for property to rent. Our goal is also to provide top notch customer focused customer service. I guess ease of use goes hand in hand with customer focused service and development. We also want to be able to guarantee that our product is reliable and that our customers data is safe. Not to mention an all inclusive feature list, full accounting records, document management, crm functionality and powerful marketing components.

So if the above is our vision for our company and its products, can we still offer it at a low price... or better yet should we? Do we price our software to be competitive or do we price our product based off of perceived value? Do we risk having a smaller user base in exchange for higher profit margins per user?

These are the questions we are currently asking ourselves and would love input on the subject.

Thank you,
Chris