Season’s greetings from Nick Cousins, CEO at Exizent
As we move towards the end of another year in the Exizent growth story, I wanted to take the opportunity to share some reflections on the last 12 months for the business.
Read the full blog on Exizent’s website here.
2023 has been a breakthrough year for the team at Exizent after the humps and bumps of 2022. Our cloud-native specialists estate administration software for legal services professionals and accountants is now being used by many firms in England, Scotland and Wales to transform the way that their practitioners do their work, increasing capacity across teams to help more clients. As we approach the end of the year, we are also soft launching our Software as a Service (SaaS) bereavement management solution for financial services firms with a handful of amazing organisations, helping them transform their bereavement journeys for notifiers and service teams – more on this to follow in 2024!
Building Exizent is a constant learning experience for all of us, and I wanted to share three insights from this year.
First up, a good SaaS business is about more than the product. We have kept faith in our Service Design led approach, which not only considers how our products help solve actual customer problems, but also how we make it easy to engage with us, how we help customers adopt our products and, critically, how we listen to and support them day to day. It’s been fascinating to see that the quality of our Customer Success team gets as much positive feedback as the quality of the product, helping to deepen adoption and build trust. For us, the key part of SaaS for a sustainable business is the last S – Service. It should be holistic, encompassing every part of your engagement model, product strategy and customer lifecycle.
Secondly, customer testimonials are the best leading indicator you can hope for that you are doing something right. When any of your customers are willing to go “on the record” in support of you and your product I consider it a great day. One of my favourite quotes of the year from a customer of ours is “The platform is revolutionary to private client lawyers; a fantastic tool in the estate administration process”. Love it!
Finally, doing anything transformational is hard work and it takes effort, perseverance and patience. One of my go-to books is The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky – it’s a terrific manual for any growing business. There is a chapter about embracing the long game, and a quote that really resonates with me and the journey we are on at Exizent, “the easy path will only take you to a crowded place”. It is the hard path that leads to true transformation, and that path is the one that underpins our purpose, to make the bereavement experience easier for everyone.
Navigating that path requires a passionate and committed team and investors who believe in the vision. We are extremely fortunate at Exizent to have both, and I want to say thank you to everyone involved for their resolute support of the business as we strive to achieve the meaningful societal change we seek.
So, as 2023 draws to a close, what does 2024 have in store for the Exizent team? We will be focused on two main objectives. First, we have an exciting roadmap of enhancements and new features planned for our legal services platform, building on the constant flow of feedback we get from our users about how we can add even more value. We are always iterating our products, with frequent releases (which everyone gets to take advantage of) and that will continue in 2024.
On the institutional side, we will be focused on rolling out our new solution for firms looking to transform their bereavement journeys. This step marks the next chapter in the growth of Exizent and we are thrilled to be working with an early pipeline of financial services firms to implement the Exizent solution, helping them to transform the experience, reduce risk and increase efficiency across their bereavement functions.
I absolutely love meeting and speaking to individuals in other businesses that deal with some aspect of bereavement who share our passion for making it better for people. There are more of those individuals and businesses out there than ever before which is fantastic to see. Collectively we can make an enormous difference.
