KCard : Assistance
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Assistance offers
Whatever service or product people want they want to
have it the more hassle free possible. This is simply because people want the
benefits without the difficulties which can be associated with getting them.
This leads more and more companies to offer assistance to help in using their
products or services. Paying for the offer
The term offer doesn't mean for free of course. One
way or another someone will pay for this extra service, but of course during
the service/product selling process this will be kept quite hidden. People
will say the assistance is free, which usually means that you don't pay for
it straight when you buy the product. The most common and yet subversive
example of this is the famous hotline assistance which you will pay only when
you use it. This example is interesting as it illustrates quite well the trap
consumers fall into with the endless music to finally be told no one is
available at the moment, the automatic repliers which usually filter your call, ... Of course during all this typing and waiting on
the phone you are paying expensive minutes. Assistance business model
In some areas the assistance concept has in fact
been transformed into a full blown and effective business model. A pretty
recent example of this is the business model generally associated with open
source software development companies. These companies spend much effort
developing freely available (source code and binaries) applications and aim
at earning money by providing service around them. Only, this model has a
malicious side effect. In order to increase their chances of getting
assistance contracts (this is their only way of earning money) these
companies tend to somewhat complexify the
applications they provide. This is dangerous because these companies'
apparently free offerings soon make a mess in the market and wipe the real
commercial competitors. It's only after this is done that they start trying
to get assistance contracts and thus complexifying
the products. Then every one is stuck with a free but unusable product for
which they finally find themselves obliged to buy assistance. Step back and jump
better
In conclusion, maybe focusing too much at making
money at the sales time isn't the best idea. In many cases it is more
effective to wait a little and make the money later with assistance. On the
other hand as consumers we should learn to be much more attentive to this
kind of merchandising. |
Ideas to develop
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