Eating your own dog food

If you think about the way certain people within your company work, you’ll realize that it’s easy for employees to be removed from customers and even their companies’ own products and services. In a lot of cases, I think the most removed people are in marketing, IT, and senior management.

While it’s not realistic to close the entire gap on this problem, I envision a new work environment where as many people as possible will be forced to eat their own dog food. What if you set up your business to make it a customer of its own products and services? Let’s think about it a little.

How I came to this realization

A few months ago, I had a client install Adobe’s Contribute CS3. Contribute allows people who are not familiar with HTML to edit web pages on their own site. The interface is a lot like Microsoft Word and other familiar publishing products. A major advantage of using Contribute is that you can edit content directly onto a web page. But important parts of the page, like navigation, are “locked,” so those with less technical experience won’t mess up the layout when they’re making their edits.

You would think this was a dream setup, right? Guess again. The client was very confused about what Contribute allowed them to do versus what they had to ask me to do for them. We also ran into tons of issues where the site wasn’t exactly set up the way it needed to be in order to work with Contribute.

Had I been using Contribute to edit the site, we wouldn’t have even run into these issues. But I was off using Dreamweaver, a more advanced web editing product. Everything was fine from my vantage point, but not from my customer’s.

37 Signals leads the charge

Companies like 37 Signals have an ideal situation because they are direct customers of their own products. In fact, they discovered the opportunity of selling their own home-grown software to others accidentally.

Because they must live with using their products every day, they can figure out the best enhancements and improvements to offer customers. I cannot think of a better way to have visibility and accountability to make things better!

What would this look like in less ideal situations?

Let’s pretend that you provide remote customer service for other companies. Let’s pretend that your customers are very specialized, so there is little opportunity to experience this customer service for your self. It’s not as simple as all Charmin employees using its own toilet paper. How could we make this company a customer of its own services?

What if the company used its own customer services resources to man internal requests for IT, HR, and marketing? What if the CEO of the company was forced to use this same customer service every time he or she needed something?

I can’t imagine having an environment where your company’s service is held more accountable. If brand is defined by people’s experience with your company, then your company better be as aware of its customer experience as it possibly can be!

How I’m going to practice what I preach

From this point forth, I am going to find ways to use my own products. For example, Clear Crystal Media’s upcoming product line services customers that want to operate an online store. Why don’t I start my own e-store and use my own software to sell products online? And I’d better use Contribute to update my website and blog if that’s what I’m advising my clients to do! (Note that this blog entry was authored in Adobe Contribute CS3.)

What can you do to start eating your own dog food? A coworker of mine at my day job instead says, “We drink our own champagne.” Is your product or service more like dog food or champagne? Are you even that sure of your answer?

Photo credit: Dog Food Bowl by JnL. Some rights reserved.