When learning how to adapt to a self-service workflow, there are two key things that business leaders need to be aware of that prevent failure:
- Pricing and configuration of what you can purchase
- Assembly of contracts and negotiation of purchase
Pricing and Configuration of Purchase Options
It’s crucial to think about how you’re pricing your product and assembling the pieces that fit together. Pricing is a difficult beast to master and is constantly changing in any business. Moving toward a self-service model, in many cases, requires the simplification of products and services you’re delivering to the market.
Within a large company, you can have hundreds or thousands of SKUs representing products across different geographies, sizes, and scales. When delivering self-service offerings to your customers or partners, you’ll want to compile your most predictable packages and products into simple solutions that are easy to explain online and transact with. That may mean cheaper or lower end products, too, which is most likely a difficult operational burden on your team already.
Assembly of Contracts and Negotiation of Purchase
To eliminate friction created on the back-and-forth of contracts, erase negotiation for contracts of smaller to middle-value deals by creating a great experience that people can access online. DoorDash does a great job of this in how they onboard merchants and restaurants.
If you head to get.doordash.com and sign up as a merchant, you’re taken through the entire sign-up process without having to be directed to a third-party or representative. Additionally, during the sign-up process DoorDash provides best practices in how to succeed with their tool upfront. DoorDash’s sign-up process hits all of the benchmarks for creating a seamless and effective self-service experience.
Providing Self-Service Experiences Like DoorDash
Streamlined onboarding through a single tool: No third-party apps or support/sales rep needed.
Step 1 and Step 2 screenshots below—both in the same workflow and not another application.
Best practices to succeed in their tool during sign up: Mirroring the onboarding flow, DoorDash doesn’t direct users to a separate page or tool to find ways to be successful in their product, they provide during sign up:
Another key factor to a successful self-service model that feeds into what DoorDash does is to think about repetitive high-value transactions that your team is executing with people manually, and how can use technology—simple apps or experiences—to allow customers to begin to serve themselves.
Examples of repetitive high-value transactions would be contract renewals, account management, contract review, basic upsells, NDAs, vendor or supplier on boarding, and the like. Think about how much manual effort these standardized agreements take and look at how to automate, so your transactions workflow aligns with that of your onboarding self-service process.
Businesses that are seeking to take advantage of market momentum, innovate ahead of the digital transformation curve, and grow their customer base need to take advantage of self-service flows. In order to do this, their contracting must go beyond traditional, manual, and linear processes. DoorDash was able to do this by paying attention to their pricing and configuration of purchase options, as well as efficiently assembling their contracts and negotiation of purchase. Evaluate where changes can be made to improve efficiency and provide customers with options that enable the self-service workflow they truly want.
