Designing a Service Offering
Whether you are already in the business of selling “service” or you are expanding your business to servitize your products, a structured approach is needed to designing the service offering.
The key difference between services and products is the customers interaction in the delivery of the service. Additionally, in some cases you may not have the luxury of deciding what services you do and don’t deliver. If you are a product manufacturer who provides after sales service then you will find that the customer doesn’t always call for support just when you want him to.
The service that you decide to sell needs to do two things; firstly it needs to provide the customer with the service they need when they need it, secondly, it needs to deliver this service in a way that satisfies the customer. As a result you need to focus on the entire customer experience.
In order to assist you in providing a great customer experience you need to understand what elements of your service are most important to your customers. Not all customers are the same so you need to be able to categorise your customers into segments and target each segment slightly differently in order to succeed. Start by identifying the key attributes of the service that you are providing, whether it is the time to repair a machine fault, the response time to a customer call, the cost of your service etc.. Then assess the importance of each of these attributes to different customers. This will help in two ways. It will allow you to identify the different customer segments that exist (groupings of customers with similar needs) and it will also allow you to focus on the most important attributes for each of these segments (which will assist you in developing a better service and not wasting money on un-important attributes).
Once you have identified the customer segments and their priorities you can either tweak an existing service offering or develop a new offering that meets the segment preferences.