The Internet is Self-Service

The concept that stood out the most to me from chapter 7 is that self-service is required. Though the most interesting part to me was the following line from the book: "It is an interesting contradiction: Consumers want to help themselves when they feel like it and be pampered by firms at other times." Why this stood out to me is because my personal project is a sales rep firm, so all of our sales are B2B. Because of that we are order getters, we go to retail shops and take orders from manufacturers we sell for, place their order, and move on to the next one.

However, when someone a customer of ours wants to know backorder information, order status, product availability, etc they do not have the access to do that like a normal consumer would. If they want to know that information, they have to call their sales rep, and the sales rep has to call the factory and ask them. This is completely opposite of what B2C consumers are use to. When we buy something from Amazon we can track our order status, see when new products will be available, check shipping status etc etc.

How this could be applied for my firm is if we could give our customers a tracking number for each order they place, they could get access to all the information a B2C consumer has. This would require all of the manufacturers to constantly update this information. It would be key for the retailer to have to log into OUR website to access the information in order to not have the rep, and our agency get bypassed. This is a huge project, and probably not realistic, but in the future with more demand for a system like this, I think it would be great! It would be a game changer.

Kiley