Forcing to lock, Choosing to engage...

In last post Customer is the king... and more!, I wrote about inevitable customer dependency and how sellers may take advantage of it.

Dependency should not create a sense of 'being locked' with the product or service. Some ways by which customer gets 'locked' are:

1. Proprietary data format and ways to read / write it
2. Custom components to do trivial jobs
3. User accounts, loyalty programs
4. Restrictive licensing
5. Artificial compatibility between hardware and software components of same seller

What are the ways to reduce - if cannot entirely remove - customer's dependencies on sellers and their products? Some ways are:

1. Increase standardization, use minimal standards
2. Increase generalization, reduce specialization
3. Make product flawless
4. Make product stateless
5. Educate customer to help himself
6. Make system customizable / soft coded
7. Provide compatible components and let customer assemble it to suit his purpose
8. Make interaction transactional

Some of these may appear to reduce business guarantee, but in long run letting customer fly on his own proves beneficial for both customer and seller.

Above ways still do not guarantee unlocking the customer from product. (except may be the last one?).

I thought of  more ways that could help unlock customer from product:

• Provide easy exchange with other systems. So that customer can easily switch between systems of his choice. A good example is a wiki site being viewed and edited in different browsers of user's choice. On the contrary, word documents can be edited using only Microsoft office or at the most Apache Open Office.
• Provide easy way out! Unnecessarily locking customer in your product / system is unacceptable to customer, and in long run to the seller as well. Giving an easy way out of your product / service is a good solution. Some examples are: Storing a data in simple ASCII text or XML form instead of proprietary format so that any other system can consume it.

Am I insane? am I allowing customer to walk away from my product? Customer is always going to be dependent, but attempt should be made not to lock him for longer than necessary! No matter what, customer never likes to be 'locked' with a system he is using.

He may choose to remain engaged, with a possibility of easy disengagement.

We should aim for a situation where, in spite of having a way to walk out of your product, customer chooses to remain engaged with you and your product. This is the best state of customer relationship.