Ask, don’t tell – meeting customer needs.

Jun 30, 2010 by John

It used to be the case that hosters and providers of online services provided their products in neatly defined buckets. They called them “Product options” but in reality it was simply a way of defining price points and keeping up with (or overtaking) the competition who were all doing the same thing.

With “Cloud” or online service consumption becoming more mainstream and business focused, this approach is now coming to be seen as a limitation to customer adoption. If someone needs a RAM heavy but CPU light environment, the chances are that the ‘bucket shops’ don’t offer such a beast, again in history this would have been a “bespoke build” and a premium charge would have been applied for the privilege.

But the times they are a changing and with Amazon’s EC2 utility model showing increasingly that flexibility in all things is key hosters are now embracing the magic of The Slider!

By allocating costs, not at the end product level but, at the component level the customer can specify exactly what they think they need. The emphasis there isn’t just because I like random italics either. If a customer defines their own product based on what they believe their requirements are, they can never claim to have been mis- or over-sold. There is also an element of truth in the assumption that they’ll also try to ‘go cheap’ too, specing a little lower because they can shave a few sheckles off the monthly / yearly costs. When reality bites and they have to upgrade, they simply use the slider tool in their Control Panel to self provision… Lesson learned, up-sell complete, effort zero.

Give customers the right tools and they’ll work out what they need, provide the right service and they’ll happily slide up the value scale with little or no direct intervention from you

Sliders FTW!