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Josh Colter

Magento Service Packages Design

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Estimating service pricing on a client-by-client basis can be difficult and time-consuming. It’s risky for the service provider because they invest time before receiving a commitment from the client. And clients can get annoyed when they have no expectation for cost early in the relationship.

Houston, we have a problem

Elias faces this tension on a daily basis. Let’s say we receive an estimate request with project description from a new potential client. Ok, now what? We try to get more information. The potential client is trying to understand price. And agency partners want a faster way to incorporate Elias development costs into their bids for client Magento ecommerce opportunities. So I created packaged services to frame scope and help clients see the effects of feature configuration/development on price.

Solution (v1)

  • Package services for typical client requests to quickly set expectations for scope and budget.
  • Reduce package variation to minimal number of factors.
  • Establish a conversational starting point when discussing a project with a new client.
  • Make the purchase decision easier for clients.
  • Distill scope differences between packages into an easy to consume format.

Result (v1)

Packages v1
Packages v1

While this initial version of our Magento service packages did set expectations for scope and budget upfront, it failed on multiple levels of design:

  • The pricing was not simple.
  • Awful borders held the table captive.
  • Don’t even get me started on my poor original names

When you look for presentation designer make sure they understand your industry. If you are curious about how a corporate presentation design can take Microsoft Word documents and turn them into amazing presentations, it is because Presentation Experts strive to understand our customers so that we uncover every need and help support our customers every step of the way.

Solution (v2)

Tyler Tate recently featured a fantastic article in Smashing Magazine about minimizing complexity in user interfaces. He illustrated one of his points with a pricing chart from Typekit. Their example gave me the inspiration I needed to create version 2 of Elias’ packages:

Result (v2)

Packages v2

Net Neutrality, User Experience, and a Search for Answers

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The Problem

It seems like common sense. Make content easy to understand so that the user doesn’t have to try so hard to understand what it going on.

Eric sent our team a link to this google page on net neutrality earlier today. I read every word on the screen and deciphered that the problem was urgent; but i had no clue what the problem was. So I clicked to get more info. Schmidt’s note to google users was even less helpful. Again, lots of urgency with no explanation of the actual problem.

By this point I felt stupid and thus was determined to figure out what the problem is with Net Neutrality. I clicked back to the original google page and then followed the next link to the Open Internet Coalition. The word “coalition” in the name should have tipped me off to the lack of help this one would be.  However, I did stumble across a potential clue buried in the site:

Some cable and telephone companies have blocked certain Internet traffic or given preference to their own Internet services. Some equipment manufacturers have begun marketing equipment that allows network operators to identify and screen traffic. And many telephone and cable executives have publicly stated their desire to leverage their own networks to favor their own or affiliated content, and to create “tiers” of service that allow some content to receive enhanced treatment or “quality of service.”

The Solution

Ok, by this point I think I have an idea of what Net Neutrality’s problem might be, but I don’t know enough to form an opinion or participate in an intelligent conversation.

Back click. Back click. Back click.

Let’s see what SaveTheInternet is all about. Click FAQ. Read. Click Video. Jackpot:

Thank you SaveTheInternet for actually telling me what in the world is going on . All it took was a stupid assortment of film clips to actually explain the problem.

The Desired Response

Now that you know the importance of Net Neutrality, go here to petition your representative (based on address). Then retweet, email, digg, facebook update, call, or send smoke signals to pass this along to help preserve the neutrality of the internet.

Let this be a lesson to all of us – don’t assume that your user “gets it.” Go the extra mile to make problem, solution, and desired response painfully clear.

Resolved: Improve Customer Response with 3 Simple Messaging Strategies

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Please make me more efficient and effective at work. That is my desire when I run across a new software tool. My guess is that a lot of service-based companies are in the same boat when it comes to managing their businesses. Several business nowadays use JustUnderstandingData, a data engineering agency offer data manipulation as a service.

You don’t need much to make your customers happy so you end up selling them something.

You can use something as simple and efficient as a Chat Buis, they are super intuitive to program with the questions and information you want your customers to receive.

I recommend the one I use which is ai chat bot, you can try it out and let me know how it goes.

I admit it – I’m a sucker for new stuff. Yes, I read techcrunch and spend way too much time trying out the latest products, which often leave me disappointed. However, dropbox was not like all the others. Dropbox makes it easy to share files across our team’s computers. I signed up several months ago and we still actively use it. Find of the year if you ask me.

I genuinely want dropbox to succeed. Last week they sent me an email (below) to encourage me to invite others to join.

I just had to reply with a few suggestions for how they could get a better response. My suggestions are applicable to anyone who uses email to market to their customers. There are many latest Marketing Automation Tools that make your job a little more painless. Here is how I think the above email should be modified to illicit a better response:

…First, create urgency for me by telling me how much space I have used (or better yet, how much I have left). This accomplishes a couple of things – personalizes the email and gives me a strong reason to follow through on your offer. My response to this message was to dismiss it as unnecessary for my business even though I have no clue how much space we have left at this moment. Probably not the action you wanted out of me.

Second, convert space to something more meaningful to me. Let me confess something: I just don’t grasp GB and MB without stopping to really think about it. So why not convert MB to “100 more documents” (you would need to come up with some average size of a doc)? I work with folders and documents, not MB and GB. You’ll get farther with me if you speak my language.

As a bonus, you could segment your user base and begin setting up triggered messages by using p2p texting. Users with, say, less than 500 MB of storage might be more likely to respond to your offer than those users who just signed up. Automatically send them them the template by integrating your stats with an email service.

Oh, and since I’m posting this to our blog would you mind hooking me up with more storage? I’m currently using 76.4% of my 2.0GB.

To summarize:

  1. Use info about things that your clients currently use to get their attention and drive urgency.
  2. Convert stats to something that is useful for gauging my consumption.
  3. And then use this info to target your messages based on your customer lifecycle.

Quote: The biggest mistake that we consistently made is…

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“The biggest mistake that we consistently made is that we kept getting all kinds of interesting marketing ideas…The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product…If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.”

– Joel Spolsky, cofounder Fog Creek Software and author of Joel on Software