Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Service Innovation is a powerful and very practical book. Unlike most books or training on innovation, Bettencourt's book does NOT start with an existing product concept that needs to be improved or a process for brainstorming ideas for radical innovations. Instead, he offers the basic but profound notion that the innovation process needs to start with a clear understanding of the job (or jobs) that the customer is trying to get done, including specific aspects ("outcomes") of performing that job. Only by starting with the customer job as the unit of analysis -- which reveals the reasons why the customer would prefer to hire one solution over another -- can the innovator fundamentally change the hit-or-miss, low probability nature of innovation that starts with a solution in mind.

This idea -- the customer job as the unit of analysis -- is consistent with Clayton Christensen's perspective that customers "hire" products and services to get jobs done. What gives Bettencourt's book its power is that it walks the reader through a very systematic process for uncovering all aspects of the customer job (using a "job map"), along with a process for determining which aspects are important to customers and, of those important aspects, which are currently well-satisfied by current solutions and which offer high opportunity as a focus for innovation. So rather than innovating a service (which usually means incremental tweaking), the firm can innovate improved solutions for doing customer jobs. Rather than hoping the new solution might be valued by customers, the firm can demonstrate how the new solution addresses important, yet currently unmet needs.

Although the book is focused on service innovation, filling a gap in the market, its insights are equally applicable to product innovation.

All in all, an excellent book.

Because you can't receive a service across a shipping & receiving dock, people struggle mightily with how to conceptualize, assign a value, design, deliver, and manage services. It's all around us: hazy definitions and jargon, "impossible to replicate" Nordstrom legends, powerhouse companies emerging from nowhere like [...]; it all seems too magical. This book is the missing manual on the basics of thinking about and deploying services from core of what we all value but can't articulate well: the jobs our customers actually want done. Everywhere across the value stream we can improve customer engagement, loyalty and impact growth with clearly articulated service design. Unfortunately this thinking just can't be accessed from a product-based paradigm.

The ideas in this book are totally practical: Need VC funding, start at page 45 and pop over to page 209. Need HR advice, try page 186. Are you in sales and marketing and need to beat your revenue goals by 10%, check out the Microsoft case study on page 33. Need operations folks clued in, start on page 174. Need a raise at work, the worksheet template on page 191 should be pretty useful to both you and your boss. Once you're equipped with basic understanding of how service models actually work so much more new thinking is possible across so many more unexplored areas.

We are emerging from the last century devoted to the products of the Industrial Revolution--a service-based economy is the obvious next step. As Bettencourt points out, innovation for services are far more "hidden" from us than are those for products. Use this book to deploy a services strategy. Then, as we all enter the "flat world" economic landscape, you'll be leapfrogging to dominance.

If there is a takeaway from this book, it is that innovation is not art, it is science. You can learn it, you can be trained how to innovate and you can control the process of innovation. In today's world it is absolutely critical for most organizations to innovate as that is how they create sustainable competitive advantages. As such, you cannot afford to think of innovation as an unmanageable proces, an art form as that leaves your ability to sustain your competitive advantage up to little more than luck. Lance Bettencourt's book provides insight into an extremely practical approach to manage your innovation process and by applying his methodology you can create innovative and competitive services.

One of the key things the book argues is that your customers articulate their needs by communicating solutions or desired solutions, which help you little in creating new services. Ultimately what the consumer wants is not a solution, but rather they have an objective they want to accomplish by using a solution. This objective, Mr. Bettencourt refers to as a job; your customers want to get a job done. For example, people use a credit card because they want to make a payment. For each job there are one or more metrics by which your customers measure how well they do on that job. These metrics the book refers to as outcomes. Outcomes for making a payment may be convenience, accuracy, time it takes to make a payment, etc.

These jobs and outcomes are independent of solutions and independent of technology and do not even change much over time. 100 years ago people wanted to make payments and they cared about the convenience, accuracy and the time it took for such payments to be made.

Lance Bettencourt's book argues that it is this mindset that can enable you to collect the right information from your customers which you can use to come up with innovative solutions. If you deeply understand what jobs your customers want to accomplish and how they measure the success of their ability to accomplish those jobs, you can easily gather information on what jobs are important for them and what those jobs are for which they have inadequate solutions. You will in fact understand how they measure such inadequacy. Once you are equipped with this information you can focus your internal resources on coming up with alternative solutions that address those particular jobs. In some cases your solutions may be completely different than the incumbent solutions (i.e. cars vs horses to get the job of transporting people from point A to point B) and in some cases they will be evolutionary. In all cases, however, you will have a pretty clear map of what you are trying to accomplish with the innovation and by what metrics your customers will judge you.

Lance Bettencourt makes your innovation process predictable. If you are in a decision making capacity about your company's services (or products for that matter), I highly recommend that you read this book. You will be able to use it as a reference for decision making for years to come.

Services constitute a big portion of our economy, but we don't have good models to understand service innovation. The author provides a very managerial perspective on the issue. He has hands-on experience which he shares. I don't think you will find anything really surprising in this book. I often felt "okay, that makes sense' and that is the problem with the book. It is quite a dull and boring read. No doubt that the author's approach is valuable if you are doing service innovation. That's why I do give the book four stars. However, I feel that for this field to advance we need academics, who have more time, to study the matter more. You can compare the current book with Service Breakthroughs (published in 1990 not 2008 as stated on amazon) to get proof that there hasn't been much improvement.

So this book deserves four stars because it has decent content and very few books are written on the subject. Had more been written on the subject, I think I would have given this book three stars only.

Dr. Bettencourt's "Service Innovation" provides a logical and sequential framework as well as meaningful real-world examples to illustrate how the "Service Innovation" process can be successfully applied across a number of service related industries.

Key takeaways: 1) Service Innovation can be (and is) a process; 2) Focus on the "jobs" consumers are trying to get done; 3) Determine how consumers feel about their ability to get their jobs done today; 4) Focus innovation efforts in areas that make the most sense to the consumer as well as to your business.

"Service Innovation" is pragmatically organized from beginning to end and easily navigates the reader through the various steps of this service innovation process.

"Service Innovation" is a fabulously insightful playbook for anyone in the services business!

This book will help those of you working in innovation for service companies to clearly understand how to discover innovation opportunities in a service context that are valuable for both the customers and the company servicing them.

In my mind, two books have, so far, really helped people made progress in how to innovate: Clayton's Christensen's The Innovator's Solution, Creating &Sustaining Successful Growth - 2003 publication and Tony Ulwick's What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services. This is the third one.

In fact by reading it I realized that in order to innovate the first thing you need to do is to innovate in the way you look at your customers needs and the second thing you need to do is to ensure that the way you look at your customers needs is compatible with your company strategic objectives.

This book will provide you with a suit of tools and concrete examples about how do this in practice in the context of service innovation. I consider myself an experienced practitioner in this domain and I have learned a LOT of new things both at the theoretical and practical level by reading it.

In particular it describes in detail four (complementary/ alternative) ways to look for innovation opportunities:

1. new service innovation
2. core service innovation
3. supplementary service innovation
4. service delivery innovation both from the client and the provider perspective.

I find the chapter on new service innovation particularly interesting as it really opens the way on what kind of questions can be asked to the customers to discover new directions of innovations that are both "out of the box" and valuable for customers. A lot of profitable growth will result for many companies by applying the perspective explained in this chapter.

I think that the chapters on service delivery innovation are also fundamental. They explain in detail how the needs of external clients when obtaining a service can be put in correspondence with the needs of the employees in charge of providing this service (ie the internal clients).

This is very important as reasoning conjointly on these two perspectives is the only way to ensure that the planned service innovations can be practically executed in a profitable manner by employees of the company. It also enables to understand how to capture and obtain new OPEX savings (e.g., operating cost of servicing and maintaining service for customers, etc) when delivering the new service.

Services Innovation is a complete tour through the innovation process. Following Tony Ulwick's seminal work on Outcome-Driven Innovation titled What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, this book brings everyone up to speed with some of the latest insights from Strategyn - which are quite remarkable.

I find the step-by-step process complemented with services examples particularly helpful. The universal job maps provided are terrific guides for services businesses who want to think about how they deliver value to their customers and where they want to focus their innovation efforts. It is generous of Lance to share that intellectual property.

While I found Clayton Christensen's prior works and innovation consultancy Innosight alluring, I have found it difficult to apply their approach in a systematic way to business. So, if you're interested in ultimately bringing innovation into your development process vs. always hiring consultants to grow your business, you're going to get a lot of mileage out of Services Innovation.

This has transformed my thinking about innovation the way Michael Porter shaped my thinking about strategy.

I'm quite active in PDMA and other product development organizations - and there has always been lots of confusion about innovating services. Now that this book has been published - there's no reason for that confusion any longer.

SERVICE INNOVATION begins with helping the reader to understand what a customer is fundamentally trying to accomplish, and using Ulwick's Outcome-driven Innovation - he describes the fundamental laws that govern a service offering. By understanding these laws, the "market ecosystem," a company can create value where a customer values it most.

Every company is in the service business - every person who is in business needs to buy this; and be prepared to read it multiple times. Pull out the pen and take notes in the margin. Keep it near your desk as you'll want to refer to it often.

This book is comprehensive, fundamental, and yet practical.

Buy it and read it!

I read a book today -Service Innovation - How to go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services. We often think of product innovations without thinking that more often, customers value services.

"Rather than ask - How are we doing, ask How is the Customer doing"

The obvious but often overlooked question. Look at it from the view of the customer. Create value in the way the customer defines value. Look at why your customers hired you (and if they bought your services - they did hire you)

There is a chapter on discovering opportunities for service innovation and one on service delivery innovation. They suggest:

Define - what ensures success
Locate - what must be located
Prepare - what is needed to be prepared
Confirm - does the customer confirm willingness to accept (or love) your service
Execute - What does the customer do to execute
Monitor
Modify - I always like refining systems to perfect them (and they are never perfect)
Conclude - What does the customer do to successfully conclude?
Resolve - What needs to be resolved to succeed?
Uncover outcomes - Now the company is ready to go

There is a chapter on differentiation that I particularly appreciated. I believe in being different. To some extent, different is better. If a company is different, there are always reasons why they can win and why they can tell customers to buy.

I find success breeds copying so it is necessary to always innovate to stay ahead.

This is a must read for anyone in the services business and for that matter, we all are in the services business.