relationships

Do customers want to customise your site?

  • Monday, 28 September, 2009
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Have you ever added a custom tool bar on your office set up?  Have your non-techy friends and family changed the background image on their desktop or changed their screen saver.  Is there a demand for customisation?

So here’s the question.  Do people really want to make your homepage look the way they want it to?  Is there a demand for iGoogle and netvibes customisation?  They look cool and are attractive to the geeks in us, but do they have mass market appeal? Is there any research out there on the take up of user customisation?

“…back when Windows 95 was released, users could easily change My computer to something more personal. Apple users had been able to do this for many years, and many of them did name their computers. But few Windows users took the opportunity to do this, suggesting that they saw the computer as more of a tool than something with which they wanted to have a personalized relationship.” (David Malouf)

Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should.  When you log into your bank account it could look like netvibes, complete with BBC news feeds and YouTube videos (you decide what you want).  But should it?

Why should your customers see your website as something to have a personalized relationship with, especially if you don’t engage them with a personal relationship throguh your other channels?

Customer or Client?

  • Monday, 10 November, 2008
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One of the things that bugs me in IT development is that the business is too often referred to as “the customer”.  “Customer” implies a transactional relationship.  A customer purchases from a seller; there is little incentive for any meaningful relationship as it will ultimately come down to price.  The buyer wants to pay as little as possible, the seller wants to charge as much as possible.

All to often IT is seen as a cost centre rather than a driver of business innovation and profit.  Maintaining the transactional language to describe the relationship between IT and the business helps perpetuate this.  We need to stop thinking of the Business as our customer.  Instead of “customer” we should look to other professional services for our metaphor.

Professions that involve a more personal, relationship driven approach to their business use “client” rather than “customer”.  Whilst retail banking has customers, wealth management talks about clients.  I think it is a subtle but important difference.   The relationship between IT and the business should not be seen as transactional, it is more consultative in its approach.  Structuring our relationship as consultant-client is a small but important first step to redressing the perception of IT as a commodity.