Bootcamp: Customer Serve Thyself

"Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a
day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

Customer self-service will play an increasingly important role in the software industry. One of the toughest parts in making a technology sale is changing customer behavior. The key to the battle is actually getting the technology into their hands, letting them kick the tires and then getting feedback. Under the old licensed software model, there was/is too much friction in the process…high ticket prices, long & expensive installations, extensive training and so on. The current generation of applications relies more on hosted solutions. They reduce the initial price tag and simplify the installation and maintenance processes.  While large enterprise applications are not likely to go away anytime soon, more and more companies are embracing software as a service. However, these still scale somewhat slowly due to market adoption challenges and revenue is spread over years versus upfront with a licensed solution.

The next generation approach…simplify it, host it, give tastes away for free and let them do it all by themselves. Let them get addicted and sell themselves. One of the amazing facts about Google is that a significant percentage of their ad sales come through without any human involvement. Feedburner has been growing at over 20% a month with a small staff because of the simplicity and self-service components of their offering. Everdream has launched one of the first corporate SaaS offerings from their self-service website. They will let corporate customers register, self-qualify, pay, provision and upload data.

Eliminate friction. Take everything out that could give customers pause about trying it such as requiring registration information, credit cards or personal information. Give them a lite version that hooks them but leaves them needing more (reporting, scale, features, etc). If they like it and use it, you will have plenty of opportunities to get the remaining information. The trick is getting the customer to use it and to change behavior.

This is not a panacea for all, but I expect that you will see more and more firms using self-service and the advantages of the web to scale their businesses while driving costs down.