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	<title>JosephThibault.com &#187; webapps</title>
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	<description>Ready, set, Joe.</description>
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		<title>The best customer is a DIYer</title>
		<link>http://www.josephthibault.com/2009/the-best-customer-is-a-diyer/</link>
		<comments>http://www.josephthibault.com/2009/the-best-customer-is-a-diyer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:54:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Joseph Thibault</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Customer Service]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[customers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DIYers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[help]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[support]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[webapps]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.josephthibault.com/?p=304</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If you work in customer service in a web-based company, the best type of customer you can ask for is a &#8220;do it yourself-er&#8221;, that shares their discoveries.  Why?  For a few reasons: The best characteristic of a DIYer is that they&#8217;re usually tech savvy.  They&#8217;re using your site not because they&#8217;ve been forced to [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>If you work in customer service in a web-based company, the best type of customer you can ask for is a &#8220;do it yourself-er&#8221;, that shares their discoveries.  Why?  For a few reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>The best characteristic of a DIYer is that they&#8217;re usually tech savvy.  They&#8217;re using your site not because they&#8217;ve been forced to or because it&#8217;s the first thing they found.  They use it because they&#8217;ve surveyed other offerings and decided that your&#8217;s is either the best, has the potential to be the best, or has some other advantage over a competing service.  (They also tend to know the &#8220;lingo&#8221;.  So supporting them from page to page over the phone or asking for a URL to the issue tends to be a simple task; not a formidable request.)</li>
<li>another great advantage of a DIYer is that they&#8217;ll trouble shoot your site for you.  Whether your using an open source application or building a proprietary platform/application, the DIYer familiarizes themselves with the environment.  They read your FAQs and they engage the tutorials/training materials you&#8217;ve created and at that point (and only at that point) if they don&#8217;t know how to do something or are finding an insurmountable error they contact you.</li>
<li>by contacting you they point out holes in your support/help foundation (because they know and are familiar with what you have provided and exhaust those resources <em>before </em>contacting you.  If you can identify these individuals early (and keep them) then they&#8217;ll be a great resource in deciding your customer support, help documentation, and even the software roadmap to improve usability.</li>
</ol>
<p>It&#8217;s possible that you refer to these types of customers as something else (allies, models, etc.), but I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll agree that these customers are the best to have (even better than customers that are silent even in the face of buggy software of outages).</p>
<p>I bring this up because non-DIYers often take up the most time and are the most costly to appease.  In some cases getting them squared away is near impossible (or perhaps actually impossible, though I reject the notion that there&#8217;s a customer issue that cannot be resolved.  I&#8217;ll die trying.).</p>
<p>In closing, if you&#8217;re trying to build a product for a market that is devoid of non-DIYers (seniors, or 1st time internet users) then be prepared.</p>
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