I happened to stumble upon an article (Salomann, Dous, Kolbe & Brenner 2007) about one of my favorite topics: new kinds of customer relationships, usually enabled by the internet. These guys, Salomann et al., talk about self-service.

First I got excited because contemporary self-service thinking would fit well with my IDBM project (more about that later). I believe that in certain forms self-service could offer plenty of opportunities. But, as usual, the discussion in the article went very much along the old paradigm where customers are treated merely as targets. Salomann et al. are referring to earlier studies: “As a matter of fact, banks are losing money on their ATMs (Florian, Burke & Mero, 2004).” This might be if you only look at the situation from the bean counter perspective. Personally, as a customer, I would change my bank immediately if I would always have to go to a teller – ATMs are actually helpful to me for withdrawing money! So are the banks losing money or just trying to provide at least the same level of service than their competitors?

I would call for strategic customer thinking as opposed to thinking about your customers only when it suits you. Authors often flirt with true customer oriented thinking (like Salomann et al: “start with your customers’ processes, not with yours”) but in the end they just mean something like “try not to get your customers angry when streamlining your processes”. I argue that enabling and facilitating customer value (co-)creation is the way to long-term profits and competitive advantage. If this is what you seek.