Many users or sales have the misconception of pleasing customer with promise of customisation to your system. However, this is not true as some services are better to be standardised and cost efficient. There is also a limit to please your customer without hurting your bottomline. What are the guidelines to avoid customising your system?
A Product View
Moving your business towards a product view is the first step to understand your customer base. A key reason of customisation is the fit of your product to customer needs. A poorly fit product will result up in a lot of customisation. You must adapt your product to fit the your targetted customer base. A well designed product should have a deviation of 10% customisation and 10% localisation.
Know your Customers
When you have decide to establish your application as a product, it it time to categorise your customer base. Your understanding of customers are important to refine your product into various types. High-end and well-paying customers can be provided with all the bells and whistles in applications. In contrast, you may not want an economic customers to be using your full featured product.
The basic guideline to stop the customisation trend for your application is to start thinking like a product. With a product view, you can position your application to each customer base. This will reduce your cost and increase your customer satisfaction with a better fit of product at valued pricing.
Danny Kwok 