Empower Your Customers

July 17 2009

By Chadwick Meyer

I recently had a frustrating (and learning) experience with DMOZ, the open directory project. This is a directory listings service that feeds information to major search engines. It is staffed by a group of fifty thousand volunteers that review website submissions to specific categories, and when approved they provide a link to your site in that category. It's recommended to list your site with DMOZ, but it can take months or years to be approved because of the inefficient nature of this volunteer project. In fact your site can be rejected and you'll never know, you ignorantly still thinking that it's pending and without any idea why it was rejected or what you should "fix".

I have no doubt that the site I submitted will eventually be included in the list (if a human being ever takes the time to review it), but it has been several months and it hasn't been listed. For all I know the volunteer for that category has found other things to interest him/her and no longer participates. It's one of the unfortunate aspects of "Open Source" communities.

But because of the closed nature of this tight lipped organization, one can easily feel absolutely powerless. The lesson to be learned is that you should always try to find ways to empower your customers, clients, visitors, etc. It would be a very easy thing for them to build an interface where you could check the status of your submission, to know if it's been reviewed, pending, rejected and why. Any information provided would be celebrated by the masses of status-hungry submitters. But as it stands, they are engendering feelings of ill-will. I believe that if they don't speed up their processing times, or find some way to provide status updates, many people will stop wasting their time and emotional energy because no one likes to feel powerless.

You should find ways to empower your own customers and at the same time reduce your own workload. Identify areas that require extra work interacting with clients and consider if an online application may empower your customers to acquire the information they need or even perform the duties that currently occupy your staff's time. Offering even the most simple functionality can distinguish you from your competitors and provide added value to your services.

Tags : customer, empowering, functionality, self-service, service

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