A hybrid model for DIY collaborative customer engagement
This is my second article on new hybrid collaborative models for customer engagement. I wrote about a hybrid human-AI model a few years ago in my article, Collaborating with the new machines.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/collaborating-new-machines-blake-rogers/
Benefits of hybrid DIY model
- With a hybrid-model, customers can participate in both service and production businesses, and build more of their own product from design to production. This results in an increasingly LEAN / agile process with improved product-market validation.
- Companies can save massive amounts of money by repositioning technicians to advise and equip the customer help themselves, off-loading a significant portion of their labor costs.
But the cost savings have to be passed on to the customers, they won’t do it for free. Or will they?
3D printing
3D printing presents an example of both manufacturing localization and costs savings passed along to the customer.
A basic 3D printing collaborative business model
Company X sells a DIY kit for making a product online or brick-and-mortar, with a pattern to start making the custom product. The customer buys the kit, makes a custom mold for example, and ships it to the business in an enclosed envelope; company X scans the customer’s patterns, prints the product and sends the custom product back.
Benefits of 3d printing model
- Moving part of the manufacturing process (taking the impression mold) to the customer as DIY reduces the business’s manufacturing costs.
- Reuse reduces costs. One cool advantage of the 3D printing scenario is they can keep the scan data and reuse the pattern, so they can make additional identical products, personalized for that customer, without selling another kit or processing new mold 3D scans, so less cost of delivery, and provide a further discount to the customer.
- Reuse eliminates planned obsolescence. Instead of making the customer upgrade and pay more for a new product by rendering the current one eventually useless and without value, with no DIY option to repair or reuse, the value from the initial product is extended through pattern reuse, creating value from replacement products.
- 3D printing brings the manufacturing back to the local community, decreasing reliance on overseas / sweatshop labor, with reduced distribution costs. Two cases of customer assumption of labor
Cases
In both cases, the customer engages in creating the product or collaborates in providing service.
- Sonic Internet (A fiber-optic cable, ISP, and digital telephone line provider)
2. HelloOtis (3d printed night-guards, a dental product for bruxism).
*I am not endorsing the quality of their products or services.
Sonic Internet
Due to the Covid pandemic, Sonic internet company required special training and hazmat-level protective gear for technicians to enter customer’s homes. the technician said customers might even have to drill into their wall.
So Sonic internet service’s customers are doing the indoor home troubleshooting, repair, and installation work, while the technician provides equipment, materials, tools and advice safely from the doorway, and uses his van as a workshop at the curb.
I climbed a ladder, unplugged the fiber optic line, inserted it into his meter, and read him the output. He determined the modem was bad. I did all the unhooking of cables, unscrewed the box off the wall, replaced and tested it. Then we upgraded and installed another router and network extenders. The technician cut zip-ties with screw-holes to fit, made me a short Ethernet cable, and the new router was ready to install.
HelloOtis
HelloOtis sells a $99 take-home DIY night-guard kit, available at Walgreens.
With HelloOtis, you get some plastic clay with and mix it with hardener, and you make a mold of your teeth yourself called an impression, which you then mail to HelloOtis. HelloOtis then digitally scans your mold, 3D prints your night-guard, and sends it to you.
I bought the HelloOtis and took it home, made a mold and sent it to them, but after a few weeks my mouth-guard hadn’t arrived. I emailed them. Since they were SF-based and close to my apartment, they came by with another impression kit that same morning, and delivered my new night-guard the very same evening.
Analysis
HelloOtis charges $100 for a product similar to what dentists might charge $500, but the quality of the customer molds may vary in quality due to customer’s lack of skill etc.
Sonic wasn’t saving much on labor costs in this scenario, because the technician was outside my door collaborating. The job didn’t get done quicker this way, and it would take a lot longer with less mechanically inclined customers. On the other hand, teaching the customer to install their own equipment could translate into lower costs.
In some way, the Sonic Internet DIY collaboration is a Tom Sawyer story, where —like convincing us to painting a fence for them — they get us to do something for free for which we should be paid. But it is certainly compelling and points towards a potentially valuable new economic model.
The Sonic guy really did not need to even come out. They could have just had a 1 hour courier deliver a DIY kit in a box, and had a technician advise me over the phone in real-time when it arrived.
My friend said I was missing a big point, he wouldn’t want to do any of this work. That’s why we have technicians.
Thanks for reading.
About the author:
Blake Rogers thinks and writes about software engineering, leadership, AI, distributed systems, complex systems and other topics.
