Create
Revenue Opportunities
Through Good Design
By Deborah
Gill-Hesselgrave, SanDCHI
I wish I
had a dollar for every meeting, workshop, executive retreat, and budget
presentation that I've attended over the years where I've listened to
software managers and company executives expound on how they could eliminate
the overhead of software technical support if only they had a better product
to sell.
While sitting
in yet another such meeting recently—this one the July San Diego
Computer-Human Interaction meeting—I had a true organizational epiphany.
I'll get to that ah ha! moment shortly.
The July
meeting featured David Foltz as our guest speaker. Foltz's topic was "Visual
Design and Usability—How Do Graphic Designers 'DO' Usability?"
It was an interactive presentation with a lot of participation from the
attendees. At one point, one of the participants chimed in to expand on
one of David's points, that design that is both effective and affectively
appropriate results in interfaces and interaction experiences that users
ultimately convert into perceptions of being more satisfied with the product.
This is clearly a good thing.
Another participant
piggybacked on that statement and added that, when companies deploy products
that are well designed, those companies could realize bottom-line benefits
by significantly reducing the overhead that is consumed by the technical
support team (e.g., Help Desk, Customer Service, the poor schmoes who
answer the phones).
No matter
how it's phrased, there seems to be this pervasive idea that the only
way to enjoy a bottom-line benefit relative to the relationship between
design and software technical support is to improve the design (duh!)
and thereby obviate the need for this form of customer service. This is
not a good thing!
This was not the first time I had heard a designer or programmer or analyst (aka: non-customer-service professional) express the belief that eliminating or significantly reducing technical support was a sub-rosa benefit of improved design. But it was when I had my ah ha! moment.
Changing
Roles
My epiphany
was that a company's real return on effective design relative to its effect
on the cost of providing technical support services does not come about
from cutting services that are no longer needed but from changing
the kind of service those groups provide.
I think what
gets lost in the minds of folks who are knee-jerk advocates of eliminating
or reducing technical customer service overhead as a natural benefit of
improved design is the understanding that these are the very groups where
the vast majority of product and customer knowledge resides. Companies
should keep these important organizations and enhance their corporate
bottom lines by recasting the roles that these service professionals
fulfill.
What? Doesn't that cost more money? Isn't the point of improved design to reduce costs? Save money?
No, not necessarily.
Creating New Revenue Streams
The flip
side of the goal of good design being to save money is for it to make
money. One inexpensive way for a company to make more money is for
it to create new services to sell into the existing customer base.
So here's
the real-world application of that ah ha! moment: an extremely
elegant way for companies to create new revenue streams is for them to
field products so well made that customers no longer need to contact Technical
Support to answer lower order "how" questions. Instead, companies
need to retrain their support staff so those professionals can deliver
value-added services that provide end users with answers to higher order
"what if" questions.
By changing the focus of their Technical Support Departments from reactive information delivery agents to proactive knowledge consultants, companies can create product-pricing models that actually add to the bottom line. This means that technical support organizations become profit centers rather than cost centers.
