Identifying the Invisible

For many companies looking to build and expand their services business, one of the biggest challenges is identifying what services they can (and already do) offer. Services are much less tangible than products and this creates many challenges when you try to segment, price and market them.

The challenges are greatest in product driven companies where the entire organisational structure is often built around product development, manafacture and sale. Many such businesses already deliver sophisticated services without really understanding their cost, worth and application. Services, it seems, can be invisible. They clearly exist, as products cannot live without them – a kind of Dark Matter in a product universe.

So how do you identify existing services and new service opportunities?

The answer is much simpler to express than it is to implement. You must  fully understand a few things:

• How your customer interacts with your business
• How your customer interacts with your product
• How your product interacts with your customers environment

To answer these questions you need to create and implement discovery methodolgies and knowledge capture processes that provide this information. This requires effective and wideranging communication and collaboration within your business.

This is a critical phase in a companies servitization and if done correctly it will uncover the invisible services available.

It won’t shed any light on the dark matter though.