Choosing school software and what the sales call will not tell you

The demonstration goes well. The interface looks clean, the salesperson is warm and capable, and you are told that this system is easier to use than what you have now and that the support is the best in the sector. You sign. Three months later you are on hold, the feature you were promised is “on the roadmap”, and the person who sold it to you has moved on to their next target.

Most school leaders have lived some version of this. The gap between the pitch and the daily reality of owning a piece of software is where budgets quietly leak and goodwill is lost.

Why this matters to schools

The cost of getting it wrong is not just the licence fee. It is the hours your staff spend working around a tool that does not fit, the training that has to be repeated, and the migration cost when you eventually give up and move again. A school does not buy software in a vacuum either. Parents, pupils and staff all feel the consequences.

Schools are also susceptible to upselling. The salesperson whose commission improves when you add a module or a bolt-on has an incentive that is not the same as yours. That does not make them dishonest, but it does mean their recommendation is not neutral, and it should not be the last word in your decision.

Where to look before you sign

The most useful information about a product rarely comes from the company selling it. Some places worth your time:

  • Other schools already using it, and ideally not the ones on the reference list the vendor hands you. A curated reference is a customer chosen because they will say the right things. Ask around your trust, your local authority and your own networks for schools the vendor did not introduce you to.
  • School business manager forums and professional networks. The people who manage budgets and contracts talk to each other, and they are candid in a way a sales deck never is.
  • EduGeek (edugeek.net). A long-running forum for the IT professionals who actually run school networks and support these systems day to day. Search it and you will find frank (often humorous), technical opinion on management information systems, hardware and edtech tools, written by the people who live with the consequences rather than the people who signed the contract.
  • Trustpilot and similar independent review platforms. Read them with a critical eye, because reviews can be incentivised or gamed. Look for detail and pattern rather than the headline star rating, and pay close attention to how the company replies to its critics.
  • Glassdoor. Less obvious, but employee reviews tell you about the company behind the product. High staff turnover, an unhappy support team or a culture under pressure all show up here, and all of them eventually reach you as a customer.
  • Companies House. A five minute check tells you whether the company behind the product is financially stable and likely to still be trading, and still supporting you, in three years. You can find out if the company is a new popup and have no history.
  • Who actually builds the thing you are buying? Is this their product, or a bolt-on they resell? It matters a great deal on the day you need a fix and the answer is “that is the other supplier”.

Then there is the vendor itself, asked the awkward questions. Ask who answers the phone when something breaks? Ask for the support model in writing. Ask to speak to a customer who has had a problem, not only a happy one. Ask for a trial with your own data.

A reference the vendor chooses for you is a marketing asset. A reference you find for yourself is research.

The truth about reviews

Here is something we have learned from the other side of the table. Getting reviews is hard work. Customers do not come along when everything is running well and freely offer praise. They are busy, and a system that quietly does its job is invisible. Let something run slow or break, however, and people are vocal. That asymmetry is worth holding in mind when you read reviews. A wall of silence is not a bad sign, and a handful of furious one star reviews tells you something, but so does the way the company responded to them.

We are fortunate that we do not see much of that at iTCHYROBOT. Like any organisation we are not perfect, and on rare occasions we get something wrong. What counts in those moments is how you react. Our approach is simple. The customer comes first, and the team gets on it as a priority.

What good support actually looks like

Support is the part of a contract that is easiest to promise and hardest to deliver. “Best in class support” means nothing until the day something breaks at half past eight on a Monday morning.

We take a deliberately old fashioned view. We are humans and people. Our clients have direct phone numbers and they get straight to us. There is no tiered support structure to climb and no chatbot standing between you and a person who can help. If you email in, you reach the CTO (Rob) or the technical director (Rob) and if it is billing or marketing related our CMO (Becky). Our customers know us by name, and when they ring, it is the same people who answer.

When you assess any supplier, this is the standard to measure against. Not “do they offer support”, but “who, specifically, will I be speaking to, how quickly and can they fix the problem or are they just going to write an internal support ticket and it go in the abyss”.

The way we have chosen to work

We are one example of what a different model can look like. We do not have a sales team. We have a core team. If you want a school website on our platform, you speak to the people who have grafted since 2010, listening to schools and built what we have today. You can come to the free weekly training run by our tech manager, or to our annual tech event where the whole team is in the room. You will not be sold to.

The core platform is a one off licence fee. When we build something new, it is added as a feature, not sold back to you as an upsell. If you suggest an idea and we build it, you get it, and so does every other school on the platform, at no extra cost. Over the years that has grown into a community, and the platform is shaped by what schools tell us they want, and sometimes by what they tell us they do not. If we hear that a feature is poor, we retire it. If we hear “would it not be good if…”, that is the part we enjoy most, because our developers can start crafting something useful without a conversation about money getting in the way.

Our mantra is to save schools time and money. We are not driven by shareholder pressure. We aim to be actively different, and we have never wanted to fit a standard model. The only pressure we work under is delivering for our schools, and our own determination to do our best work. If you have time for a coffee and an idea to share, the coffee is on us, and we would be glad of the chat.

Before you sign

Do one thing the sales process will not prompt you to do. Find a school using the product that the vendor did not introduce you to, and ask them what happened the first time something went wrong. The answer will tell you more than any demonstration.