What's a TWiki Customer?

Trick question: there is no such thing. Customers pay for goods or services. TWiki is free (as in beer as well as in speech). Only individuals or companies that are paid to install TWiki or to create a TWiki application have customers.

TWiki has users, not customers.

-- Contributors: MeredithLesly

Discussion

This is not a frivolous topic. Talking about customer-oriented TWiki or market-driven innovation posits that money is involved. There's nothing wrong with people making money from TWiki, but person a='s customers are not =person b='s customers unless =person b is getting paid as well. And no one's customers are those of the TWikiCommunity as a whole.

Focusing on what benefits the users of TWiki is another matter. I'd like to think that most or all of us who are working on the project want users of all stripes to have the best experience with TWiki possible.

-- Contributors: MeredithLesly

TWiki customers are probably possible to represent as a subset of Persona once the full set is produced.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 08 May 2006

You're missing my point. There is no such thing as a TWiki customer. They are the customers of someone who is making money using TWiki.

-- MeredithLesly - 08 May 2006

Wikipedia:Customer That's a point for Meredith. Although I always treat all my users as customers irrespective of their attitudes.

-- FranzJosefSilli - 08 May 2006

I'm don't think I am missing your point, Meredith, but I am having problems accepting it.

This was refactored out, I'm putting it in again: If customers must have to do with "pay", the pay that interests me is eventual contributions back to the community (not "money" per se). Imho this can happen in many ways once a company starts to see TWiki as of value to its business.

As I see it, I'm taking part in delivering a service ("The TWiki") to my customer ("The user"), for a very fair price ("The free as in beer/speech"), having naive hopes that I eventually will get some extra cash back ("The contribution"). Some would think it's a bad business model :-), but it's a business model none the less.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 08 May 2006

I don't know who refactored it out. If it was me, I did it by accident. There seemed to be some lock conflicts on this topic.

-- MeredithLesly - 08 May 2006

"Customers pay for goods or services" not all customers do:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer
• http://www.answers.com/customer

I don't think there's anything wrong with talking about TWiki Customers. We're all aware that people don't pay for twiki. (Some of us are more painfully aware of this than others.) I think when we use the word customer we are meaning it in it's broader meaning of consumers or clients.

I also think it says more about how we want to view ourselves than how we view our users; we want to think of ourselves as providing a professional service/product, not something which we don't care about. (Please note the use of "want to" in the above sentence. I'm not saying we are that, I'm saying that's where we want to be, our target.)

-- SamHasler - 09 May 2006

As I said in TWikiIRC: TWikiCustomers == Anyone with a running TWiki installation.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 09 May 2006

It cannot be a surprise that I also disagree with the original statement since I use the word customer about both our admins and end-users all the time.

Most of us are contributing to TWiki with the basic desire to create something a lot of people are happy about and have good use of. We get sad when people are not happy. If we did not care we would hold our contributions to ourselves and not share them. We are paying back to the community because we have the time and the skills. That is the whole heart in the open source movement.

You take the free stuff and you pay back with contributions. Contributions is also bug reports and feedback, and we more regular contributors should try our best not to talk against the people that complain. Without complaints we cannot know what is good and what is bad. A complaint is a contribution. The worst are the silent what walk away without saying why. I am happy to see that most developers do see our users and admins as customers and we should not be afraid of using that word even if they do not pay any of us with money.

And taking everything with customer focus, making decisions between choices with customer focus, making priorities which bugs to close with customer focus etc is the only way to ensure that TWiki continues to become a better product.

The most important is to listen to our users as customers. Even when they are frustrated and appear unreasonable. The important thing is to try and understand the true root cause of the frustration which is often different than what is actually raged against.

A customer = Twiki user who is treated well will come back and contribute. Either as coders if that is a skill they have. Or as testers, or with feedback, or with small TWiki Applications, or by being good TWiki advocates.

-- KennethLavrsen - 09 May 2006

People are free to use whatever word they want to, of course, whether it's being used accurately or not. There is, however, nothing to disagree with, as I was citing a definition.

It's also true that many of the core folks do have customers. Anyone who is responsible for a TWiki site at work are being paid, even if it's not official part of the job description. Others are being paid to create TWiki sites. I'm one of those. But in these cases our customers are the people who are paying us, either directly or as part of our salary, not TWiki users as a whole. (Obviously it's a good thing if the product benefits as well.)

Just because I think of TWiki users as that -- users of TWiki -- doesn't mean that I intend to do any less of a professional job. I don't need to think of them as customers for that. It's statements like "I think we need to be more focused on the market" or the idea of establishing a "market focus group" that make me uneasy.

-- MeredithLesly - 09 May 2006

Now I see Meredith point. A TWikiCustomer not always is a TWikiUser. So "customer-centric" and "user-centric" are not interchangeable.

So, "customer-centric" features are those that helps TWikiAdmins and developers. Example:

• Easier upgrade process
• Stable API
• Backward-compatible plugins

and "user-centric" features are those that help the end user and TWikiApplication programmers:

• Easy-to-customize skins
• Good base documentation package
• Tutorials and How-To's in twiki.org
• PerformancePerformancePerformace
• Internacionalization.

Am I right?

-- RafaelAlvarez - 09 May 2006

Yes, this is a large part of what was motivating me. Thanks so much for clarifying what I left murky!

Primarily what's left are the "client-centric" and "market-centric" (couldn't we ban the use of that horrid faux suffix?) issues.

For example, what your (in the generic sense) client needs is often not the same as what my (ditto) client needs. One hopes that this doesn't lead to a conflict, but it does mean that what we're focusing on is likely to be different, and neither is necessarily aligned with what the core developers think is most important.

There's also the existing-client vs. potential-client tension, which is more likely to lead to a conflict of goals. In the most obvious of tensions, existing clients have a major stake in upward compatibility. When potential clients are evaluating competing products, backwards compatibility is only meaningful in the sense that the developers take care not to abandon existing customers, so things like performance, easy of installation, etc., may be at the top of their evaluation list.

Finally, there's the rather odd (IMO) "market-centric" stuff. This is, in part, what made me think about the rather loose use of the word customer in some of the topics. Crawford put it best in his comment in ProcessForMarketDrivenInnovation of 20 Feb 2006 when he said "Twiki is not a product in the classic sense". (Do read the rest of his insightful comment.)

I don't know the history behind Peter's comment in the same topic "I have seen that some of my market driven proposals have been rejected by the community - as I see it - because of developer centric views" and (at least in that topic) he didn't elaborate. Given his new business venture, he does in part mean "customers" and "market" in their literal meaning. Unless he's planning on channeling some of the revenues back to the developers and other people who work on TWiki, there's a potential conflict of interest that makes me uneasy.

(Of course, this is also true of anyone else who has a business venture based on TWiki. I mention Peter's company because I'm aware of it and because he identifies himself as "Mr. TWiki".)

-- MeredithLesly - 09 May 2006

I have trouble with the money definition of customer, for a practical reason. Where I work we talk about all sorts of people as our customers, but no money changes hands. This word is mandated for us in the context of ISO9001 and ISO1799 business management systems, which tend to control all we do write and say. In that context, i.e. in our context, we are always talking about customers and never about anything paid for. The organsiation, not me, would be a customer of TWiki, and the TWiki installation (including what its users put on there) would have many internal customers. The main users would be customers in another sense, the department manager would be a customer who also has his customers to take care of, and many more customer relationships would be involved.

It makes it difficult for some people to be included when you make a blanket ruling about a word's definition like that, and I'm sure that wasn't the intention, which is why I'm chiming in here. The point was a good one, that we don't have paying customers and we need to look at both admins and end users. I'm reaching the same point of argument by going to the other extreme and saying everyone's a customer, because I must.

Today I feel very much like a customer with respect to twiki. I'm "shopping around" for a product to do a task at work, preferably free but maybe not, and assessing some candidates. TWiki is a good one, but I've found a couple of things today that give me the irked customer feeling. In the hat that I'm wearing today I'm a corporate customer, and from that viewpoint there's a new set of priorities, many of which differ from some of those I see here. Definitely a customer attitude I'm bringing here today, because I'm trying to market research the best intranet collaboration tool that we can use and permit our business to rely on. The customer angle makes me emphasise the word rely. That includes adequate shipped documentation of what we've got under our fingers, ability to document our own configurations against the original docs, and a well structured and fairly conservative development cycle, both of which give good but unbalanced scorecarts for TWiki. As a user or an admin, it's great already, no need to nitpick on that account.

I'm still "shoppng" around. Sometimes you can't get a skirt that fits in the preferred colour and you need to assess a whole range of customer options, including that of deciding not to be a customer. The more important it is going to be, the more you adopt the customer mindset. Some business management systems ensure that the customer mindset never leaves, no matter how low in importance the matter is.

With my own TWiki, it would never enter my head that I might be, or have, a customer. It's a community.

-- SueBlake - 12 May 2006

You made several good points, Sue. I guess the problem is that English, at least, doesn't have a good alternative to the word customer -- consumer just doesn't cut it -- and, as you point out, when you're "shopping around", you are behaving as if you were a customer, irrespective of money. And, as you point out, the word customers is used in the corporate world even if no money is changing hands.

My point was never to dictate how people think of themselves, and I'm sorry that the way I've put things made you feel that way. It is interesting, however, that you feel like a customer when it's a corporate installation and not when it's a personal one. I guess that reflects what you feel your obligations are to your users. In a corporate setting, those obligations are high and serious; in a personal setting, much less so.

So, in brief, point well taken.

-- MeredithLesly - 12 May 2006