How many customers are you trying to please at once?
The question of your target audience and how to satisfy that audience challenges product based and service based companies alike. On one end of the spectrum stand companies that attempt to market how all customers how they can benefit from one all-purpose solution. On the other end stand companies that emphasize their ability to provide a tailored solution for every customer’s individual needs. While the first approach, taken to the extreme, faces the risk of “jack of all trades master of none,” the second approach can be unrealistic, expensive or slow to execute.
Now let’s think about this dilemma from the customer’s perspective. Out-of-the-box solutions may not match your exact needs, especially if your company is constantly adapting or growing. But for small businesses, customized solutions seem limited to enterprise budgets.
What’s the right balance?
Ifbyphone just announced a flexible speech-to-text transcription program that offers 3 ways to transcribe audio files (voicemail, IVR and other audio recordings) and 3 quality levels.
Here’s what Ifbyphone says in their press release:
Ifbyphone is the first cloud telephony company to offer customers on-demand access to three levels of transcription quality:
- Standard Transcription: Fully automated machine transcription
- Premium Transcription: Combined machine and human transcription
- Ultra Transcription: Human only transcription
Irv Shapiro, CEO of Ifbyphone, commented on Ifbyphone’s “flexible transcription architecture.” His approach sheds an interesting perspective on our questions of how to offer customers with flexibility, and how much flexibility to offer.
“We are working hard at Ifbyphone to provide businesses of every size with a single source for Automated Telephone Applications which work with any telephone,” Shapiro said. “We continue to enhance our suite with pre-built solutions a company can rent, integrate with their core business processes or extend with custom solutions.”
Notice that Shapiro talks about a single source, not a single solution. By building an architecture with multiple quality choices, customers can decide on the pre-built solution that’s right for them. As the customer, your ability to stay with the same transcription/ automated telephone provider, despite your possibly changing needs, is incredibly valuable. From a marketing perspective, Ifbyphone’s offer draws the “best of both worlds” from the two extremes that we mentioned above. Ifbyphone is not claiming that they provide a “one size fits all” transcription solution, nor are they saying that everyone needs to go through a process of personally customizing a voice transcription service. Rather, they offer a set of automated telephone application choices that put the ball in the customer’s court, and keep the customer in the game for the long run.
When have you confronted the dilemma of how much to customize a product/service in your role as a marketer or as a customer? What advice would you offer other small to mid sized businesses?
Read more about Ifbyphone’s transcription service on their company blog.
Related posts:
- Ribbit Announces VTT-sa™, Next-Generation Voice-to-Text Application
- Vocalocity Releases Voicemail Transcription at ITEXPO
- Voice Quality is Key to Success of Cloud Telephony
- Netflix Markets to its Existing Users
- Marketing Agency Increases Phone Leads by 42%
