Service Innovation and Design
PetSmart Inc. is the largest specialty pet retailer of services and solutions for the lifetime needs of pets. They operate more than 1,232 stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, providing a broad range of competitively priced pet food and pet products; services including pet training, pet grooming, pet boarding and pet adoption services. Their stores are stocked with more than 10,000 products, all available at everyday low prices.
They are their own label which they put on their grooming services. They sell their own store brands of pet care products. They also market their partner’s services, Banfield Pet Hospitals. They provide loving and attentive service to all pets who are brought into their stores for training, grooming, or medical care and their owners. They also are steer away from the “warehouse” look and now work to make their stores brighter and more inviting. If you wish to start your own business, or if you want to introduce a new service innovation there are a few things one must know product/service characteristics, strategy characteristics, process place characteristics.
Table Of Content
- Challenges of service innovation and design
- Services Innovation
- Important considerations for service innovation
- Stages in service innovation and development
4.1 Front End Planning
4.2 Implementation - Service Blueprint
- Summary
1. Challenges of service innovation and design
Services are largely intangible and process oriented, they are difficult to describe and communicate. Some of the main challenges that are faced in the service sector are
- Oversimplification: “To say ‘something flies’. Some people will picture a bird, some a helicopter and some an angel”. In our modern global economy, service system have significantly increased in complexity, often involving networks of service firms, customers, and evolution of offering over time.
- Incompleteness: In describing services, people tend to omit details or elements of the service with which they are not familiar.
- Subjectivity: Any one person describing a service in words will be biased by personal experience and degree of exposure to the service.
- Biased Interpretation: No two people will define “responsive”, “quick” or “flexible” in exactly the same way.
2. Services Innovation
Service innovation has been defined in various ways. McDonald corporations significant restaurant redesign and menu changes in the recent years are examples of offering innovations. In other cases service innovation is associated with new internal service processes that will make an organization more productive and efficient.
For example, many of IBM’s current Smarter Planet initiative are aimed at transforming entire service system, including health care, education, transportation, and government, through service innovation.
3. Important considerations for service innovation
It is important to involve both customer and employee at various points on the innovation process. It is also important to use a systems or design mind-set to be sure all elements are considered and integrated.
- Involve customer and employee: Because services are produced, consumed, and co-created in real time and often involved interaction between and among employees and customers, it is critical that innovation and new service development processes involve bot employees and customers.
- Employee service design thinking and techniques: Recognizing the complexities and requirements of service innovation, the field of “service design” has emerged and is gaining increasing attention from business practitioner, design consultants, service marketers, and variety of academic disciplines.
4. Stages in service innovation and development
The challenges typically lie in defining the concept in the early stages of development process and against at the prototype development stage. An underlying assumption of new product development process models is that new product ideas can be dropped at any stage of the process if they do not satisfy the criteria for success at that stage.
The front end determines what service concepts will be developed, whereas the back end implements the service concepts. When asked where the greatest weakness in product and service innovation because of its relative abstractness, which is even more apparent with intangible, complex, and variable services than with manufactured products.
4.1 Front End Planning:
1. Business Strategy Development:
The first Step is to review the vision and mission of the company. The new service strategy and specific new service idea must fit within the large strategic mission and vision of the organisation.
2. New Service Strategy Development:
The product portfolio strategy and a defined organizational structure for new product / service development are critical for the foundation of success. (Possibility in terms of markets, types of services, time horizon, profit criteria).
The framework allows an organization to identify possible directions for growth.
Offerings are some of the most common approaches.
- There should be formal mechanism for ensuring an ongoing stream of new service possibilities.
- The mechanism may include a formal new service development department with responsibility for generating new ideas, suggestion boxes for employees, customers, new service development teams to identify new services.
3. Idea Generation:
Formal brainstorming, solicitation of ideas from employees and customers, lead-users researchers and learning about competitors.
4.Service Concept development and evaluation:
After clear definition of the concept, it is important to produce a description of the service that represents its specific features and then to determine initial customer and employee responses to the concept.
5. Business Analysis:
Assuming the service concept is favorably evaluated by customers and employees at the concept development stage, the next step is to determine its feasibility and potential profit implications. This stage will involve preliminary assumptions about the costs of hiring and training personnel delivery system enhancements, facility changes. The organization will pass the results of the business analysis through its profitability and feasibility screen to determine whether the new service idea meets the minimum requirements.
4.2 Implementation:
6. Service development and testing:
It involves construction of product prototype and testing for consumer acceptance.During this phase, the concept is refined to the point where a detailed service blueprint representing the implementation plan for the service can be produced.
7. Market testing:
The new service may be offered to employees of the organization and their families for a time to assess their responses to variations in marketing mix. At this stage, pilot study has to be done for the service, to be sure that the operational details are functioning smoothly.
8. Commercialization:
At this stage, the service goes live and introduced to the market place.
- The first is to build and maintain acceptance of the new service among large numbers of service delivery personnel who will be responsibility day-to-day for service quality.
- To monitor all aspects of the service during introduction and through the complete service cycle.
9. Post introduction evaluation:
At this stage, the information gathered during commercialization of the service can be viewed and changes made to the delivery process, staffing or marketing –mix variables on the basis of actual offering to the market response.
5. Service Blueprint
A service blueprint is a picture or map that portrays the customer experience and the service system, so that the different people involved in providing the service can understand it objectively, regardless of their roles or their individual point of view.
Service blueprints give an organization a comprehensive understanding of its service and the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — that make it possible. Focusing on this larger understanding (alongside more typical usability aspects and individual touchpoint design) provides strategic benefits for the business.
Blueprints are treasure maps that help businesses discover weaknesses. Poor user experiences are often due to an internal organizational shortcoming — a weak link in the ecosystem. While we can quickly understand what may be wrong in a user interface (bad design or a broken button), determining the root cause of a systemic issue (such as corrupted data or long wait times) is much more difficult. Blueprinting exposes the big picture and offers a map of dependencies, thus allowing a business to discover a weak leak at its roots.
6. Summary
Service providers must effectively match customer expectations to new service innovations and actual service process design. However, because of the very nature of services-specifically, their intangibility, variability, and co-creation elements-the design and development of service offering are complex and challenging.
