One thing many people love about the web is the fact that it is simple and easy start almost any project. I can create a blog on WordPress, a podcast on Mevio, then syndicate it using Feedburner so I get stats and a nice customized feed, and then I can back to it on my WordPress blog, and suddenly I’ve created a TV/Radio show with a website to boot. Now all I have to do is advertise it on Twitter, Friendfeed, and iTunes. The entire process of doing this sort of stuff is really easy, because the entire thing is automated. But is it a good thing that it is automated? What do we lose by making this entire process automated. We lose quality but gain quantity.
Isn’t it always a great experience when you get on the phone with a company, and suddenly you are informed about an option that they don’t normally release onto the web and ads? Or when you are able to negotiate with a sales representative in order to get only the parts you need, thus lowering the price? I think that an automated process of signing up for services takes away from the company’s ability to make customers more happy by providing case by case basis on services. I encounter this frequently with web hosting.
I have a few scripts I want to run on a server. It takes up less than 100 MB of data. I also only need a MySQL server and a good high amount of bandwith. I’d rather pay more on getting a lot of bandwidth, than pay for 400GB of server space and 200 MySQL databases. It would also benefit the web host, because the disk space on the server that I’m not using can be leased out to other people, making more money per GB of disk space.
Spam is the most annoying thing in the world. It gets into our email and suddenly we can’t find the important messages. It creates bogus accounts on social networks and services that basically do nothing but attempt to get you to click on a link. Spam irritates me. Most of this spam is caused because people can click and make an account automatically, and then abuse the service in as many ways as they can untill their account gets banned. Then they just go and try again on another account. When all of this is automated, you can’t stop them from making that second, third, twentieth acount. But by having them talk to another person to sign up, the representative can realize that the person is bogus fairly easily. This means the first account, much less the twentieth, is never created.
Now for the other side, the dilemma part of it. Often, it takes more resources to have companies talk to individuals one at a time. In order for them to flaunt big numbers, they have to make it extremely easy for someone to sign up. (Which in turn makes all the numbers bogus because half of the accounts aren’t even doing anything) The other way around is true as well, many people like having a completely anonymous sign up.
So, what do we lose by having an automated ‘Sign Up’ process? We lose the ability to customize our service to what customers want on a case by case basis and we lose the ability to keep bogus people out of the site. But does that outweigh the positives? You decide, comment and tell me what you think. Should companies have sign ups on service automated or not?
