Imagine your company is looking for a new business solution for your enterprise. You’re looking for software that you can deploy to thousands of users and you’ve narrowed down the options to two vendors.
Vendor A seemingly has everything you’re looking for. Their feature set is strong, but you know from experience that there are always capabilities you can’t foresee in advance.
To protect yourself against these future needs, you ask the vendor about allowing users to build or modify their own components, like forms, charts, metrics and reports, or even workflow automations. Without self service capabilities, Vendor A can only respond in one of four ways:
Professional Services
The company can steer you towards a costly professional services engagement in order to build the components your users would like to have. This engagement will be on-going, as you know your users’ needs will be continually evolving over time.
Build It Yourself
The company may suggest you build all of these components yourself using their API or development environment. This is also a costly, time-consuming option as needs will forever be changing.
Coming Soon
The company can welcome your feedback and let you know that they’ll add your suggestions to their future roadmap. When, or if, those features ever arrive is anyone’s guess.
Not Available
Lastly, the company can simply say these requests are not something they’re interested in adding to their platform.
All of these options are too costly, both in terms of time and money, and none of them provide true self-service capabilities. Now consider another option, Vendor B.
Vendor B has taken a different approach to these problems. They offer full self-service capabilities. After your company provides users with a base set of functionality and templates, those users are free to interact with all of them, editing them, making changes and customizing them to arrive at exactly the forms, charts, reports and automations they need. All of this can be done without waiting for Vendor B to provide more functionality and none of your development teams need to be involved in creating custom components for individual users.
You’ll quickly realize that the potential savings from Vendor B could be massive for your company. With tens of thousands of users, even minor manual changes could easily become a mountain of work that will likely never end. Vendor B’s approach is the fastest way for your users to help themselves to the information and insights they need to make better, faster, more informed decisions.
