Nick Frank, a specialist service management consultant with Noventum Service Management continues his series of case studies outlining best practices in field service...

Previous case studies showed some of the steps companies can take to understand the value of service to their business. Companies have deep dived into their customer’s journey, gained insight into what the customer’s perceive as value, as well as determined what their own corporate strategy is to make money. Secure in this understanding they are ready to implement their GO To market strategy. And the first step is to develop and deploy service propositions that speak to the customer.

What is he talking about you may be asking yourself?  Go look at your website or those of your competitors and see how the services propositions are described. I looked at a company I used to work for and found what is typical for many. Descriptions of what they do!

If you are an engineer or product guy, it kind of makes sense, because its what we do! But think from the customer’s perspective. Managers are interested in outcomes. In most commercial organisations this is how they are paid and what they do.

So if you are really a customer led organisation should you not also focus on the outcomes? This is what Yokogawa did. In our previous blog we talked about how they developed a clear view of the value their customer’s perceived they could offer. Well they took this view and designed their propositions around it.

They literally tried to design service propositions that would speak to their customers.

So if you look at their vigiplant (http://www.yokogawa.com/vps/vps-index-en.htm) service offering, you will notice that the language they use to describe their portfolio has a very marked customer orientation. They group their services in terms of outcomes:

• Opportunity Identification Services
• Solution Implementation Services
• Lifecycle Effectiveness Services[/unordered_list]

They try to use a language that describes the value. In other words they talk of ‘Production Excellence’, rather than how it is might be delivered through ’Software Products’.

Now this is quite a different approach and one that took me a long time to really appreciate. That the words we use are a reflection of our own values. So if we look at how companies describe their services, what we see is their true culture and attitudes towards their customers and clients.

At Noventum we call this ‘Service Thinking’. To learn more about this and how to successfully deliver service propositions that really speak to your customers, why not look at this case study on Service Thinking (http://www.noventum.eu/cases/believe-in-service-thinking)

Nick Frank is a service specialist with Noventum Service Management

Read part one of Nick's series here

Read part two of Nick's series here

Read part three of Nick's series here