

Building Features for Customer Retention - _raghu
http://blog.raghuveer.info/post/18183186632/building-features-for-customer-retention

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NameNickHN
Too many features really is a problem.

In the beginning you get customers who complain about the lack of features,
but after a while customers start to complain, that there are too many
features. Since this started to hurt us, we are now hiding features. As the
customers become familiar with the software, they start requesting this
feature or that. It's only a matter of activating the feature for this
particular customer. Easy as cake.

Another approach we're thinking about is feature levels. Like levels in games
the customer gains access to new feature levels by completing the current
level. Or the software could activate features after a certain amount of time.
Like when a customer installs a software and updates it every couple of
months. With each update they get new features. They have time to get familiar
with the new features. And after a while new features are revealed.

In the end, I don't think it's a good idea to cripple the software just to
keep it simple.

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_raghu
Interesting idea to hide features and activate it only for customers who
request it. similar to gmail labs in my opinion. In our case, it slowly became
difficult for us to manage the interface with many permutations possible based
on what features were active. For now, we put that hold. Did you get into any
such issues?

~~~
NameNickHN
The problem mainly was too many configuration options. There is basically one
user view (calendar) that is controlled by a bunch of options. Those options
grew in numbers over the years. We just hide the more obscure ones until a
customer comes along and asks for it.

