We’re seeing the line continue to blur between the roles that customers play as “outsiders” being sold to and served by a company and the roles they play as “insiders” generating new content, proactively acting as marketers or sales people, and self-servicing their products and accounts.
Here’s a dramatic example from BusinessWeek’s current cover story: “Residents [of online game Second Life] spend a quarter of the time they're logged in, a total of nearly 23,000 hours a day, creating things that become part of the world, available to everyone else. It would take a paid 4,100-person software team to do all that, says Linden Lab. Assuming those programmers make about $100,000 a year, that would be $410 million worth of free work over a year. Think of it: The company charges customers anywhere from $6 to thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of doing most of the work."
Since most prognosticators believe that massively multiplayer gaming is in its infancy, the creation of customer-generated value will likely grow exponentially in the coming years in this area alone.
But customer-created value isn’t only happening in sectors such as gaming or among other “Web 2.0” companies that may be being dismissed by more traditional firms.
In working with a leading financial services client, we learned that many customers preferred to solve their problems themselves, essentially to be their own service rep. For many service issues, only when self-service channels like the company’s website failed to meet their needs did many customers pick up a phone or visit a branch. Improving the effectiveness of self service interfaces is therefore eliminating a significant amount of these expensive human-to-human service calls, saving our client tens of millions of dollars per year. And those 8-digit figure numbers aren’t in a virtual currency; they are real profits in American dollars.
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