Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services

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A leading authority in service innovation, and backed by proprietary research from Stratgyn, the global leader in management innovation consulting, presents the key to how a company can discover opportunities for breakthrough products and services by thoroughly mapping the job a customer is trying to get done.

About the Book

Services now make up nearly 75% of the GDP in the United States and other developing countries. Current approaches to service innovation begin with a presumed service solution, focusing on requirements and unique characteristics of services rather than the needs of customers. Such approaches lead to incremental service improvements and more confusion than insight.

The secret to true service innovation is to shift the focus away from the service solution and back to the customer. Rather than asking, "How are we doing" a company must ask, "How is the customer doing". A proper focus on the jobs that customers are trying to achieve and the outcomes that they use to measure success when hiring a service enables a company to systematically uncover opportunities to both improve current services and innovate entirely new services.

This book offers the first detailed consideration of service innovation from the perspective of customer needs. It offers universal frameworks that draw from practical experience and academic models for understanding the jobs and outcomes of customers and designing innovative service concepts around them. At every point, this book will offer practical guidance for the so-called "fuzzy" front-end of service innovation.

This book will enable a company to: understand the distinct types of customer needs that can guide service innovation; capture and prioritize customer needs that guide service innovation; discover opportunities for new service innovation; discover opportunities for core service innovation; discover opportunities for innovation of supplementary services; discover ways to improve a current service from a customer and provider perspective; design innovative service concepts based on unmet customer needs; deliver innovation concepts that are aligned with customer needs.

Features

Bettencourt is senior consultant at Stratgegyn

Foreword by STrategyn CEO Ulwick, author of What Customers Want which has sold 18,000 copies

Like What Customers Want, Strategyn will support this new book through client engagements, keynotes, and as a calling card to their global client base Bettencourt is a former professor of Marketing at Indiana University and has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and California Management.

Review on the topic of service innovation:

"Strategyn's global leadership team consists of expert consultants and powerful thought leaders in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, The Netherlands, Central and Eastern Europe and South America. Strategyn's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation."- Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School

Market / Audience

Senior and mid-level executives of service companies, e.g., healthcare, travel and entertainment, financial services, professional services, technology companies, etc. Specific roles include marketing, service operations, customer service, and business development executives and managers, new service developers, and strategic planners. A secondary audience for this book is senior and mid-level executives/managers of product companies who are looking to compete on services, e.g., software companies, manufacturers, etc. Professional affiliations of readers may include the American Marketing Association, American Management Association, Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), and Product Development and Management Association (PDMA).