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

Don't ask your customers, "How is OUR service doing?" Ask them, "How are YOU doing?" Advance praise for Service Innovation: "To the CEOs of all service companies I deal with: READ THIS BOOK!" -- Dave Wascha, senior director, Bing Product Management, Microsoft Corporation "Lance Bettencourt deftly blends his academic and consulting experience to provide an example-rich, readable, practical, and innovative discussion of service innovation." -- Leonard Berry, coauthor of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic "Provides the robust framework to design services that unlock growth opportunities for every business." -- Lance Reschke, vice president, Ceridian Corporation "The tools and guidance in this book will inspire companies, small and large, to create effective and innovative services that are desperately needed." -- Mary Jo Bitner, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and coauthor of Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm "Cracks the code from the fuzzy front end through the complete life cycle of Service Innovation." -- Angelo Rago, division vice president, Global Customer Services, Abbott Medical Optics "Filled with rich examples of how firms can innovate service through helping customers get jobs done." -- Stephen W. Brown, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University "Any leader intent on providing distinctive value to customers must read Service Innovation." -- Michael Reynolds, staff vice president, Commercial Marketing, WellPoint, Inc. If there’s one truism about the service sector, it's that businesses don't succeed by inventing a better mousetrap; they succeed by finding the best, most cost-effective way to get rid of their customers' mice. In industries ranging from heavy machinery to health care to financial services to consumer goods, service innovation is helping businesses find new revenue streams--and enhance existing ones--by satisfying their customer's need to get things done. Few understand this better than Lance Bettencourt, a strategy adviser at Strategyn and a leading educator in management innovation consulting. And in Service Innovation, Bettencourt gives a master's class on the art and science of creating breakthrough service products. True service innovation demands that you shift the focus away from the solution and back to the customer. To achieve this shift in your business--one that takes you from making educated guesses to building a clear model to guide service innovation--Bettencourt instructs on the finer points of how to rethink your approach to the customer's needs: how the customer defines value in a product or service. Bettencourt mines nearly 20 years' experience in teaching and advising clients with service- and product-dominant businesses to demonstrate proven ways you can build, streamline, and focus your company's service product innovation processes. Among the numerous key ideas and practices are: Insight on understanding the different types of clients you serve—and how your products deliver value to them Ways to design specific frameworks for discovering service innovation opportunities for new, improved, and supplementary service products Practical guidance on staying focused on the "fuzzy front end" of service innovation The fundamental elements of a winning service strategy Finding new ways to help people solve problems and get things done is why there are goods and services in the first place. And in Service Innovation, Lance Bettencourt fills a vital need by delivering the essential guide that can put your business on the latest frontier of value creation. Lance A. Bettencourt (Bloomington, IN) is a strategy adviser with Strategyn, Inc., the pioneer of outcomedriven innovation. Prior to joining Strategyn, he served on the marketing faculties at Arizona State University and Indiana University.