Service Business Strategy

As Europe’s economic fortunes plummet, effective management of your service business becomes integral to ensuring profit. Amidst increased pressure to deliver a mature service capability, the financial status quo provides the opportunity to review your modus operandi and embrace powerful new incentives to enact a total service transformation. Without good leadership however, new initiatives tend to veer off track. Leadership is, more often than not, the major differentiating factor in a company’s level of success. The question becomes: What makes a successful leader in the services and how do you lead your company to profitable growth? At Noventum, our consultants have defined four priorities to first-rate service leadership; a good Strategy, focus on the Customer Experience, attention to the virtues of (what we call) the Service Factory, and developing your Employees’ skills and understanding. These considerations will be addressed in the upcoming Service Management Conference and through our executive Service Leadership Course.

Reorganising around customers and markets has radically changed the organisation in Philips Healthcare. However, changing the organisation does not change the behaviour of the people. Neither will customers automatically experience a positive difference. This presentation is about the journey to live into the brand promise of Sense & Simplicity.

 It is seen as one of the major challenges to move more intelligence and knowledge from the field to support centres or remote centres, becoming stronger and stornger in remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, remote maintenance, remote diagnosis, improved work preparation dispatching, remote resolution of issues and also remote application support.

Besides benefits in productivity and efficiency, it is a means of developing new (value added) services, hence helping service proiders to face commoditisation of products and basid product related services.

Reorganising around customers and markets has radically changed the organisation in Philips Healthcare. However, changing the organisation does not change the behaviour of the people. Neither will customers automatically experience a positive difference. This presentation is about the journey to live into the brand promise of Sense & Simplicity.

Yokogawa is currently developing a new service strategy. This strategy is based on Industry service market evolution as well as new technology evolution. As Yokogawa wants this service strategy fully customer-centric, Yokogawa’s approach was to review, adapt, amend this strategy and services concepts according to customers feedback. The interviews were essential as the first step into these new developments.

The market is now fully customer-driven. The offer of basic services isn't enough anymore. Learn how to have an 'outside-in' view from a customer perspective and how to organise your services differently to operate in a customer-driven instead of supplier-driven market

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), are they an effective approach to value creation?

The main purpose of M&A is to add value to shareholders, based on the assumption that to merge or make an acquisition will produce higher corporate potential value than the value of the two separate companies.

The logic is quite simple: Companies can benefit from combining the two companies in fixed cost reduction available from economies of scale. Most examples involve purchase of a competitor; or companies in similar core activities, however, evidence from different source, highlights that only one in three M&A deals achieves the expected increased corporate value. Recent research reveals results were even worse in Europe: in the last three years, less than one in ten transactions can be considered successful.

Strategies followed by successful service companies demonstrate that there may be a cyclical nature to business focus, emphasised during periods of growth and recession. Service is now firmly recognised as a mechanism that can and will deliver growth, and has proven to be a resilient revenue creator and margin builder. That does not mean product development or technological development will give way to service, quite the contrary; closer alignment means that they become integral. Cloud computing is an example – highly reliant on technology development, but fundamentally demonstrating value to the business through provision of a service offering.

Research carried out with a number of the best performing companies; found that the majority of senior managers were visiting up to a hundred customers a year, believing that there is a high correlation between relationship-building and customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, if supported by good service.  The same research also highlighted that the senior manager could occasionally be seen as a soft-touch by the customer if they gave away hard-won margin on a contract, which underlines the absolute necessity to treat customer centricity professionally and not believe a few positive customer-focused actions will win hearts and minds.

The service operation has to be heard and understood in the Boardroom, if it is to achieve its primary role of business development (revenue and profit growth) through feedback from the customer to the business. This close alliance with the customer is often referred to as customer intimacy and recognises the role of the customers in helping the supplier to continually improve product quality performance, and increase the relevance and usability of the products to themselves and the customers. The best way of achieving customer intimacy is to gain recognition from the Board that the service operation is not simply a provider of good service and satisfied customers but will generate and contribute to the profit of the business.