Business services include advertising, marketing, consultancy, facilities management (including travel and catering), security, waste handling, shipping, staffing and administration. Most companies, whether small or large, need one of these services at some point in time.
The difference between a service and a product is that the value of services is intangible. This means that they cannot be stored for the future or produced and sold on demand. A company that offers a service needs to constantly adapt its offerings to meet changing market conditions. This is a challenge because it requires new skills and new thinking.
Service Design
The most important question for a service business is how to make the offering attractive and useful to customers. Like product businesses, service companies must get the four critical elements of service design — customer value proposition, experience, resources and management — all working together.
If one or more of the four areas is weak, a service will fail to generate sufficient return. It will be hard to attract and retain top talent, and the business may experience significant financial losses.
A key to the success of a service company is the ability to communicate in a way that makes it easy for people to understand what it does and why they should do it. This is particularly important for service-oriented businesses that offer complex, abstract and often difficult to describe services.
Service Differentiation
Because of the intangible nature of services, there is no simple answer to the question, “What is your service?” This creates a great deal of complexity when it comes to identifying and developing a company’s identity and brand. This problem is compounded by the fact that service-oriented companies do not have a physical presence in the market place, unlike product-oriented companies.
The best way to address this problem is to develop a unique and distinguishable business model for your service. The goal is to provide a product that is more valuable to your customers than the competition’s and to establish a reputation for quality that will serve as a barrier to entry.
What Is a Business Service?
The definition of a service is an activity or process that provides a commercial benefit to others. This can be in the form of a business transaction, or a more intangible benefit. The service might involve teaching or coaching, a physician’s treatment or transportation, among other types of activities.
There are many different ways to provide business services, but all of them are designed to help the organization function more efficiently and effectively. This includes reducing expenses, improving processes, creating better communication, and improving employee productivity and satisfaction.
When a service is well designed, it can be very profitable and can provide the business with an opportunity to compete more successfully in the marketplace. However, if the service is poorly designed, it can be expensive to run and can also result in low returns. To avoid this problem, it is necessary to understand the service’s value proposition, its market environment and the role of its employees. Then, a company can begin to implement a plan for making its service more valuable to its customers and more profitable to the business.