Customization as Abdication

One of the drawbacks of customization is it places the burden upon the customer to decide what options best suit their needs. There’s a careful balance to be struck between the extremes of burdening the customer with design decisions and restricting the customer a standard offering.

The era of mass production was very much about standardization: a product could be produced very efficiently if every unit is exactly the same and the customer can take it or leave it. Henry Ford’s statement that “a customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as its black” reflects this attitude – and he held fast to it until he began losing ground to competitors who offered other choices.

In recent years, technology presses us a perhaps too far in the opposite direction. While it is in some instances delightful to be able to pick and choose among hundreds of qualities, features, and options, it’s now become quite a chore to have to tell a product manufacturer all of those details.

I don’t see a way to arrive at a perfect blend for every customer. No matter how you balance the freedom of choice against the burden of having to choose, someone will tell you you’re making it too hard and someone else will tell you that they feel constrained. You will never get that right for all people.

But more to the point, my sense is that technology is pressing us too far to the opposite extreme, where the customer is burdened with many choices – not just from different providers, but from providers who refuse to design a product and instead lay that task on the customer.

You can wrap that in whatever rhetoric you please, but it comes down to a lack of competence, or perhaps a lack of moral fiber. If the producer makes the decisions, the producer is to blame if customers don’t accept the product. If he can duck the responsibility of making a decision, but instead depend on the customer to do so, then the customer must accept the blame if the final product doesn’t suit his needs.

And that is the abdication of service. If a producer cannot provide a solution to a customer’s needs, but merely follows the customer’s preferences without lending any assistance to the decision-making process, the question becomes: what is that producer really doing for the consumer?

Ultimately, the producer of a product contributes value to his customer by providing a solution. The physical good produced is merely a means to that end, and likely less important than the intangible element that makes the physical product of value.

To be clear, I‘m not arguing in favor of the opposite extreme of standardized products and no customer choice –a balance must be struck that does not go to the exact opposite extreme of requiring the customer to design a product that serves their own needs. In may instances, the customer doesn’t know – and what he is paying for is your expertise in determining a solution, not merely to make a thing according to someone else’s directions. To refuse to provide any assistance is to abdicate the role, and responsibility, of a service provider.