My 8 years old daughter offered her helping hands to assemble the DIY (Do-it-yourself) bookshelf that I bought from IKEA. I was amused to see her first labored up, later down to an Allen Key using her two tiny hands to tighten the screw to no avail.
IKEA, do-it-yourself home furnishings
At IKEA, you pay and transport bare skeleton furniture home and fix it on your own. To make you do part of their jobs has eventually made IKEA the world’s largest furniture manufacturer. It’s called “mass collaboration” (to make the website owner gets rich) in Web 2.0 term. :)
This is the power of DIY.
Only by DIY, IKEA manages to flat-pack and save much of their transportation costs and warehouse space. In flat-pack, large percentage of IKEA items can be stuffed in a sedan and driven home by customers.
But when FingerTec adopts the DIY concept, neither we want to flatten FingerTec readers (simply because we can’t), nor shifting the installation, setup, training and all the technical supports from the resellers to end users.
Our DIY concept is to lower the technical barriers for resellers and customers.
For resellers, you have almost everything to market and support the products with ease using our online resources. For end users, you would find a lot easier to adopt FingerTec in your daily operations.
Our DIY concept including of the following efforts:
1. The hardware and software should be easy to use and free from technical glitches. Our Product Development and Quality Control teams well understood this objective.
QC:Burning test for 7 days
Manuals & Video Guides to be packed into every individual product
2. Step-by-step video guide with user manual for users. To reduce training and support costs. Failure rate to adopt fingerprint device is lowered down to the minimum.
3. Step-by-step video clips for hardware repair. Do not need to return the faulty machine to us; resellers DIY and save on transport cost.
4. Localization. Have you ever seen any fingerprint products that provide standard local language? We have over 20 languages for hardware and 14 for software. Our sales team can speak 10 different languages.
5. Marketing materials? Plenty in softcopies or hardcopies. To help you to sell in no time. My Indonesian partner once told Norana, “I beat one veteran in fingerprint business by just showing the management a few FingerTec marketing videos without much talking, and I secured the project.”
6. Training? Of course. Online. Most of our resellers worldwide self-trained by tapping on our training resources.
7. Extended technical support to end-users. Our system helps resellers to support end-users. Any technical query from users that write to support@fingertec.com will get our direct response within 24-hour, it is inconvenience to route them back to their vendor, unless specified so by certain resellers. An end-user technical website http://user.fingertec.com is established for users to self-help themselves for any technical problems.
8. We have designed and redesigned our packaging to reduce the packaging size and weight, to be environment-friendly and fit just fine to protect products and to save transportation cost. That’s IKEA!
IKEA DIY concept is reversing a supposedly full-assembled furniture to bare bones in a smart way. A lot of customers don’t mind the troubles; to them it’s fun to assemble a table or a chair.
But for Hi-tech equipment, it is no fun. The lesser you do, the more troubles customers have to bear. We have to shoulder them all to lower the threshold, to make the sophisticated products become simpler and easier to use. And, it works! We have sold FingerTec products to clients in over 90 countries in the world, and far more than IKEA. (Revenue wise can’t be compared-lah. We are like toaster; they are apples. People eat apples everyday.)
This is the power of DIY.
Many may argue that FingerTec makes things easy, but not really DIY, and customers still have to engage installer or vendor to help them to get the machine up and running.
“Can I just buy FingerTec on the shelf and make it work on my own?”
I take the challenge from there and now TA100 DIY is the answer.
TA100DIY, the front page packaging design
(To be continued in my next article: “TA100 DIY, A Concept Realized”).
by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ
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