No hoops, no loops

At the workshop, held by DigiFabster, Materialise, and AM-Flow on October 3 at PromFacility in Rovereto, Italy, we made the point that the "customer journey" should be short and sweet, without deviations, roadblocks, or holdups.

For a digital technology like Additive Manufacturing, where the lion's share of product information can be captured in one file, that should not be a problem: By uploading the file the customer explains what he needs in terms of geometry, then adds specs for material and post-production.

Once that's done, the seller has all the information he needs to come up with an offer, after which it's up to the customer to accept or not and pay (or not :-)).

At Digifabster we're working on making that journey even shorter, with our e-mail parser, whereby the customer journey starts from an email with attachments, straight out of the center of his comfort zone, the way he's done it for the last 25 years.

What we observe, however, is that a lot of digital technology shops keep confronting their customers with the behind-the-scenes complexity of their processes, making the journey harder, not easier.

In our presentation, we compared 3 companies and their online presence and explained why the company that states "send us your files, we'll send you your parts" has the best Income/FTE ratio.

We're going to publish that presentation here, in installments, and hope to be finished by the start of formnext, to continue the discussion in person. Stay tuned.