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Full service or self-service? Learn how to find the right balance for your business and where OpenSRS lands on that spectrum.
Full service versus self-service
A key strategic question in any service business is where to play along the spectrum from managed service (or full service) to self-service. This is particularly true with Web services, which can be either particularly sophisticated (necessitating full service) or particularly simple (enabling self-service).
The answer, as always, will be driven by what your customers need and what you are good at. It will also be influenced by your competitive landscape, your resources, your cost of goods and other business considerations.
The OpenSRS business
I'll use OpenSRS as an example. We have a big, talented team of engineers and I think we develop pretty usable solutions. Our resellers are also about as capable as they come. But a couple of other factors nudge us more toward managed relationships.
The services we offer are quite sophisticated and quite critical. Registries keep on tweaking their platforms. Spammers keep on spamming. And millions of websites and mailboxes depend on us to run smoothly. It is inevitable that we are going to have to help resellers through our responses and iterations and that they are going to come to us with custom problems and questions. Plus, it's tough to differentiate ourselves from our competition based on product alone when the product attribute our resellers seem to rank highest is "doesn't fail".
So, while we are indeed hard at work on a profoundly more usable control panel, a more flexible API and more robust documentation, we staff a whole bunch of support people, account managers and communications folks and, ultimately, make our living offering superior service.
Although even at that end of the spectrum, we go from lower touch relationships like our Storefront program to higher-touch ones like a large email migration, led by our professional services team. So, our resellers can get as much or little as they need from us. And we manage to achieve both the volume and the blended profit margin we need to have a healthy business.