Helping Low-Tech Customers Step Up

Here's a hypothetical for you: You've finally brought your business into the 21st century. You've got the electronic billing and customer relationship management software cranked up. You've thrown away that cranky old fax machine in favor of scanners and electronic documents. And you've even set up instant messaging for your service reps to interact with customers. You're fully wired, a real high-tech operation. Silicon Valley startups have nothing on you.

There's just one problem: Your customers have no idea how to use any of this technology. Business technology is funny that way; it's most useful when everyone is using it. Take e-mail, for example. I remember a time when only some businesses had e-mail accounts, and even fewer used them. Being able to receive an e-mail from your customer was great … if only your customers knew how to send one.

It's no different today. With so many new business technologies coming to market every year, chances are that your business uses something that your customers can't understand. I call these customers "analogists." It's not that they don't want to use digital technology; they just don't get it. And it makes interacting with them more time-consuming and labor-intensive.

This kind of one-sided relationship does not have to be an imposition, however, and there are many things you can do to help these customers into the 21st century of technology. Here are two classic, but diametrically opposed, examples:

Give it to them. If your customers don't have the technology to interact with your company, you can always give it to them (if you can afford it). Trunk Club is a personal shopping service for men who can't be bothered to go to the mall (which is nearly all of us). The company connects men with personal shoppers using webcams running over Skype, which is a free communications service over the Web. The personal shoppers then make recommendations and piece together wardrobes based on what they're seeing. But limiting your customer base to only those men who own webcams, know what Skype is, and are comfortable using both is … well … limiting.

To solve this dilemma, Trunk Club sends potential customers a free webcam and walks them through the setup process (which is actually quite easy). The webcams are relatively inexpensive and the Skype service is free, so the costs to Trunk Club are a wash. So Trunk Club's solution to analogist customers is to teach them.

Charge them for it. Another approach to analogist customers is to offer the technological updating as a service. Just look at SeamlessWeb. This company allows businesses to order food from hundreds of different restaurants using one Web site. It even tracks the purchases and sorts them by expense accounts or client, simplifying this burdensome process for law firms and the like. Its primary customers have always been big firms that order a lot of takeout food. But many of the restaurants SeamlessWeb wanted to include didn't even have Web sites, or if they did, the sites were very basic. So, SeamlessWeb started a side business designing restaurant sites and creating online ordering systems for them. This new revenue stream is lucrative in and of itself, but it also helps enable SeamlessWeb's primary business model.

Remember that not all customers are created equal — and adjust accordingly. As science fiction author William Gibson once said, "The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed." That is to say, not all customers are created equal. Some will not be as technologically savvy as you are. And that's OK. The trick is to think about ways you can continue to service these customers and not lose them because they can't keep up. Providing the technology they need, either for free or as a service, is an innovative way to keep the relationship alive.

Dan Briody is the author of two books and the former executive editor of CIO Insight Magazine, a leading publication for information technology managers. He is also a frequent contributor on technology topics for Wired., Inc. and BusinessWeek magazines.