Seth Godin writes about products that should strive to be loved vs. those that should strive to be less annoying:
The goal is to create a product that people love. If people love it, they’ll forgive a lot. They’ll talk about it. They’ll promote it. They’ll come back. They’ll be less price sensitive. They’ll bring their friends. They’ll work with you to make it better.
If you can’t do that, though, perhaps you can make your service or product less annoying.
There are things about offshore development that people love. Price. 24 hour work cycles. Great service. However, most of the time, they leverage offshore development out of necessity: due to budget limitations or aggressive development goals. Although we believe they should, most of our clients don’t love offshore development. They simply do it because it works.
This shouldn’t be surprising. It is almost always easier to love a service when it’s sitting next to you than when it’s thousands of miles away, sleeping while you are awake. Offshore development companies should focus on being less annoying:
Think of the pretty ordinary things you do or places you go. Could they be less annoying? What if the marketers there spent time and money to eliminate annoying? No, it’s not the sort of big time stuff that leads to love, but they’re probably not going to get to love anyway. I’m not going to love my dry cleaner or the post office. But if they made them less annoying, I’d spend more money and go more often. Face it, you use Fedex because it’s less annoying than the post office, not because you love them.
At Monsoon, we’ve spent almost a decade ramping up US project management, leveraging online tools, and streamlining communication to the point where we are as minimally annoying as possible. Does that mean there aren’t things that people love about our service? No. We’ve built strategic expertise. We’ve set up systems that are, in many ways, more efficient than our onshore counterparts. And, we’re nice people.
But mainly, we strive to get our customers their projects delivered on time. We stay up late so that they get to sleep. We respond to feedback quickly to take advantage of time differences. In short, we do whatever we can to limit annoyance.
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