A pre-sale step moves to self service when a record already holds its output, and stays with a person when a room or a signature produces it. Sorting a funnel takes a question about the queue in front of each step: a free consultant, an open line, a calendar slot, a dealership visit. Every handover leaves a bill: the showroom kiosk asks for no identity, so the business never learns which trims were compared.
The test is what the buyer is waiting on
What decides whether a pre-sale step can move to self service is not how hard the step is but the queue standing in front of it. Two steps in the same funnel rarely wait on the same thing, and that is why sorting steps by difficulty never shortens the list. Naming the queue does.
On a KGM SsangYong showroom floor, a visitor’s question about trim differences was waiting on a person: whichever consultant happened to be free at a busy hour. When the queue is a person, the step depends on that person’s availability, and availability is not something a business can buy more of at the moment it runs out. At Diotek the queue was not a person at all but a channel. Survey requests arrived by telephone, and a visitor who reached the site while the line was busy simply went away. The scarce thing there was the single route the request had to travel.
Tahlil.com shows another kind. A patient wanting a lab result explained was waiting on a place in a calendar. An appointment slot was being spent on an explanation, and the physician answered the same question over and over. Here the queue is the scarce resource itself, which is a specialist’s time. At the KGM SsangYong online store, what stood in the way of building a car by trim and colour was a visit. That step lived behind a dealership door, and the brand wanted it in front of the door instead. That is not a screen design decision. It is a decision about order inside the funnel, and it gets made before anyone draws a screen.
Once the queues have names, the question changes shape. Nobody asks whether to build a website. They ask whether this step’s output can be produced without spending the thing in front of it.
The answer is not always yes, and this is where the test earns its keep. In some steps it produces a boundary rather than a handover. What waits at Diotek is not a form somebody has to fill in; it is capacity being determined on site. What waits at Tahlil.com is the physician’s reading. For those two the test answers a narrower question: how far can this move.
The split falls out of the same question. Every step has a place where the request is created and a place where the output is produced. The first travels almost always, because a request is a record. The second travels only when the output can be read out of a record.
Comparison without a consultant leaves no record behind
Why a showroom floor holds only so many cars, and why a busy hour leaves nobody free to explain trim differences, is argued in our piece on when an off-the-shelf build stops paying and a custom one starts. The KGM SsangYong showroom kiosk removed that particular wait from the shop floor. A visitor moves through the whole range and compares equipment packages on the dealership’s own touchscreen, and updated equipment details reach the screen without a brochure going back to a printer.
The kiosk puts no identity step in front of the screen, so nothing is ever stored about which trim a visitor compared. Someone walks up and starts using it. When the barrier to entry is zero, the record produced is also zero. Those are two faces of one decision.
The cost becomes visible at the moment the visitor turns from the screen to a consultant. There is no session to hand across. The consultant asks which packages you were looking at, and the conversation starts from nothing. The waiting was removed, but no link was built between the screen and the person standing next to it. The business gets nothing back either: how often a trim was compared, or where a visitor paused, is not collected anywhere.
That was chosen deliberately. The way to capture the comparison is to put an account step or a data-entry step in front of the screen. Do that and the visitor whose wait you removed now has a new wait, which cancels the reason the step moved in the first place. Put a gate in front of a behaviour you want to measure and what you end up measuring is not the behaviour; it is the behaviour of the people willing to pass a gate.
An alternative was available and was turned down. The same content could have gone out as an app installed on the visitor’s own phone, and that version would have produced records, since installing an app means opening an account. But asking someone who is standing up, in a hurry, and already inside the dealership to install something first replaces a short wait with a longer one. So the app stays on the dealership’s device.
This step moved only for a visitor who already walked in. The screen belongs to the shop floor, so the wait faced by someone who never came through the door is untouched. The kiosk did not remove a wait from the funnel; it removed a wait from inside the showroom. Saying so does not shrink the result, it names where the result applies.
If the buyer configures the car, someone defined the combinations first
At the KGM SsangYong online store a visitor picks a model and builds it through trim and colour. Each choice updates the price and the car on screen at the same time, which is how the price arrives before any dealer visit. Checkout opens as the continuation of that same flow, so nobody rebuilds the car they already configured.
What makes this step movable is not that the price is easy to calculate. The price is a value read from a record. Had it come out of a specialist’s assessment, a screen could not have produced it, because a screen does not decide anything. It reads.
A configurator can only open after every sellable combination exists as its own record in the catalogue. Each trim and colour pairing carries its own price, its own image and its own sales condition, and all of that has to be written before the screen runs at all. Which record a combination is written into is the subject of our article on modelling product variants. The step you took off the buyer created a new step inside the business, and that new step belongs to the brand’s side of the table.
The cost cannot be deferred either. A combination the catalogue never defined cannot be built on a visitor’s screen. Open the configurator before the definition work is done and a visitor reaches a configuration with no price attached, at which point the step lands back on a person, only now there is a screen in the middle of it. The ordering is not reversible: a screen is the face of work already finished somewhere behind it.
There is one more thing the moved step leaves behind, and it is permanent. Prices change, images change, sales conditions change, and each change has to reach the screen. Where that load falls is settled when the system is set up. Here the sales channel runs on the same technology set as the brand’s corporate site.
Split them across separate sets instead and the self-service step slowly claws its cost back over the years, because every update then has to appear on two different teams’ agendas. That is a quieter bill than the definition work, and it arrives later, which is exactly why it is worth pricing at the start.
The survey request moves to the website; the survey stays on site
At Diotek the thing that moves to the website is the request for a site survey, not the survey itself. On this HVAC and ventilation site a visitor asks for a date for their premises before choosing any equipment, and the request travels its own path into operations instead of merging with post-installation service calls. Why those two request types travel as separate records is covered in our article on keeping survey bookings apart from service calls. The gain sits there too: intake no longer depends on the phone line, and requests that arrive outside working hours still land in writing.
Unit capacity depends on the space. The company has to see the room before quoting, because what sets capacity is not a figure the visitor already has to hand. Volume, insulation, which way the windows face, how the space gets used through the day: all of that is read on site. Trying to squeeze it into form fields would hand the assessment to the visitor’s own observation, and the quote would then rest on an estimate made by the person receiving it. So the visitor leaves the site without a price. What was gained is not speed. It is that the request stops disappearing.
This is not a shortcoming. A form that tries to infer capacity from a few screen fields cancels the company’s own rule about not quoting sight unseen, and it cancels it in the software layer where nobody voted on it. When software overrides an operating decision, what you gained is not a step but an exposure. If the number given on the first visit turns out to be wrong, the loss is not limited to that one quote.
The same line runs through other trades in the same place. Any funnel with a survey, a measurement or an examination in it splits into two. The request is a record and the result is a judgement. Records travel; judgements do not.
An unbooked reading adds a second door without closing the first
Tahlil.com lets a patient take a reading without an appointment, and that reading adds an entrance to the funnel instead of removing the physician step. On the platform a patient enters a single value into a tahlilmatik tool and sees which reference range the result falls into. This was not a side effect somebody noticed later; opening a second, unbooked entrance into the platform is what the component is for.
Where that door opens is a build decision. The second entrance was not spun out as a separate product; it was opened onto the platform’s existing data model, the one the patient site, the physician panel and the mobile app all sit on. Built as its own product, an unbooked visitor and a registered patient would have lived in two different systems, and the second door would have opened beside the funnel rather than into it.
The cost is plain enough. This reading does not stand in for a specialist’s interpretation, and responsibility for every interpretation that reaches a patient stays with the physician who approved it. How that approval gate is constructed is the subject of our article on keeping a person in the loop on AI decisions.
The same pressure could have been attacked from the appointment side: shorten slots, open a separate short consultation type for explanations, slice the physician’s day more finely. Every one of those redistributes a scarce resource without producing more of it. The test splits the step instead. Which reference range a value falls into can be read from a record, so it moved. What that value means for this particular patient is a judgement, so it stayed.
Push in the other direction and the same test says stop. A step that needs expert judgement does not move to self service, and forcing it turns the output into text nobody answers for. Handing a signed judgement to a screen is a way of deleting the signature, and the text left over is defensible neither by the patient nor by the business. Tahlil.com was built on the opposite call, and it still runs on it.
What each step gave back and what stayed with a person
A step whose output can be read from records defined in advance moves to self service; a step whose output comes from a physical assessment or a judgement someone signs for gives up only the request that leads to it. The table applies that one test to each piece of work above.
| Funnel step | What moved to self service | What it gave back | What a person still does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comparing the range and trim differences on the showroom floor | A visitor browses the whole range and the differences between equipment packages on the dealership’s own touchscreen | The comparison happens without waiting for a free consultant, and updated equipment details reach the screen instead of a printer | The consultant conversation. With no personal data left on the screen, nothing records which trims were compared, so the conversation starts from zero |
| Configuring a car by trim and colour and seeing the price | A visitor picks a model, builds it through trim and colour, the price follows the selection, and payment continues in the same flow | Configuration and price arrive before any dealer visit, and the selection carries into checkout so nothing is entered twice | Writing the price, the image and the sales condition for every trim and colour combination on the brand’s side |
| The pre-sale site survey | Only the opening of the survey request: a visitor asks for a date for their premises before choosing equipment | Intake no longer depends on the phone line, after-hours requests land in writing, and they stay out of the service queue | The survey itself. Unit capacity depends on the space, so the company sees the room before quoting |
| Getting a first reading on a lab result | A patient enters a value and sees which reference range the result falls into | A second entrance opens into the platform with no appointment, and a first reading no longer costs a slot | The physician’s interpretation. The wording that reaches the patient leaves the physician’s hands |
The last column carries two different things at once. One is the work that stayed with a person: the consultant conversation, the survey, the physician’s reading, the definition work on the brand’s side. The other is what the business can no longer see. Nothing accumulates about which trims were compared on the kiosk, and a self-service step that produces no record leaves no measure behind either. Keeping both in one column is deliberate, because both are the bill for the same decision.
Not one of these pieces of work removed a human step. A self-service step does not shorten the funnel; it removes the wait at the front of it. What gets shorter is the time a buyer spends getting to the next step. Saying that out loud early also makes the conversation with a sales team easier, because the question of whose job the screen is taking gets asked on day one instead of after launch.
Applied wrongly, the test produces two failures, and they look nothing alike. The first is trying to move a step that cannot move: inferring capacity from screen fields, having a calculator write an interpretation that needs a signature. The second is refusing to pay the precondition of a step that can move: opening a configurator before the combinations exist.
Both end the same way. The step returns to a person, and this time there is a screen in the middle of it. The screen makes the returned step more expensive than it was originally, because once a buyer has seen that the answer is obtainable alone, picking up the phone reads as a bigger step backwards than it did before.
Running this on your own funnel takes a few passes and no software. List the steps. Name what the buyer is waiting on in front of each one. Then ask where the output comes from: a record, a room, or a signature. Hand over the ones that come from records, and on the rest hand over only the request. Last, write the bill: which preparation work will pile up, on whose desk, and which record will stop existing.
The first pass usually knots up on the catalogue side rather than on the screen. Which breakdown in your catalogue carries its own price and its own sales condition is a question that comes before deciding which step a buyer can take alone. Our e-commerce service page sets out that sellable unit decision and how it shapes the checkout that follows. What happens after configuration, meaning the chain that runs from a selection to a quote, is covered in the article on turning a configured result into a quote.
