The customer is always right. Therefore I must think that for some customers a Web site is a source of problems.

I’m having a customer that is willing to change their hosting provider to another one that uses very old technology and holds a lot of security issues. What’s the rationale? 

That hosting provider doesn’t offer any authentication method, is static HTML and is inexpensive. That means that less interactivity with the customer’s employees equals less possible problems. And of course less time lost, less training, etc.

That would go against most of my believes, but in this case I’m not the customer!

If my customer is right then I must try to understand how to better listen to his/her needs. My conclusions are:

1. For some, the Web is an online brochure. In that case should be inexpensive to have and should look good.
2. For some, the priority is not to use the best out of the technology. It is important to “be there”.
3. Having a customer that doesn’t need to have a great interactive Web site is not bad. Actually can be very profitable to keep static pages with less related expenses like licensing, maintenance, support, infrastructure.

The paradigm to break is:

I want to offer my customers the best service I can provide. That includes my experience and my believes of what is better for them.

Providing the better service for my customer is to understand what they need, even if they don’t know how to express it.

It is not a philosophical competition on who is right. I should not even try to convince the customer that what I’m offering is better if they can’t understand or agree with what it would take for them to run my advise successfully.

A Scenario with negative outcome:

• I convince the customer to use a great CMS.
• The customer doesn’t place a process for editorial work.
• The site even powered by the CMS looks static on the Web.
• Conclusion: The CMS was expensive and the results the same as a non editable Web site.

In order to understand what is the most important for my customer’s Web sites I will ask:

1. Dou you have someone responsible for the Web site maintenance?
2. Are you thinking to integrate your new Web site with existing offline processes?
3. Do you have some concrete and specific result you expect from your site? If yes, is it aligned with your organizational vision?

It’s better to show what you know by letting your customer decide what is good for them while using your knowledge and principles to make that decision worthwhile. 

Image: Creative Commons - Josef Stuefer