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

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

<p><b>Advance praise for Service Innovation:</b> <p><i>"To the CEOs of all service companies I deal with: READ THIS BOOK!"</i> -- Dave Wascha, senior director, Bing Product Management, Microsoft Corporation <p><i>"Lance Bettencourt deftly blends his academic and consulting experience to provide an example-rich, readable, practical, and innovative discussion of service innovation."</i> -- Leonard Berry, coauthor of <i>Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic</i> <p><i>"Provides the robust framework to design services that unlock growth opportunities for every business."</i> -- Lance Reschke, vice president, Ceridian Corporation <p><i>"The tools and guidance in this book will inspire companies, small and large, to create effective and innovative services that are desperately needed."</i> -- Mary Jo Bitner, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and coauthor of <i>Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm</i> <p><i>"Cracks the code from the fuzzy front end through the complete life cycle of Service Innovation."</i> -- Angelo Rago, division vice president, Global Customer Services, Abbott Medical Optics <p><i>"Filled with rich examples of how firms can innovate service through helping customers get jobs done."</i> -- Stephen W. Brown, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University <p><i>"Any leader intent on providing distinctive value to customers must read Service Innovation."</i> -- Michael Reynolds, staff vice president, Commercial Marketing, WellPoint, Inc. <p>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. <p>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. <p>Few understand this better than Lance Bettencourt, a strategy adviser at Strategyn and a leading educator in management innovation consulting. And in <i>Service Innovation</i>, Bettencourt gives a master's class on the art and science of creating breakthrough service products. <p>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. <p>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. <p>Among the numerous key ideas and practices are:<ul> <li>Insight on understanding the different types of clients you serve―and how your products deliver value to them <li>Ways to design specific frameworks for discovering service innovation opportunities for new, improved, and supplementary service products <li>Practical guidance on staying focused on the "fuzzy front end" of service innovation <li>The fundamental elements of a winning service strategy</ul> <p>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 <i>Service Innovation</i>, Lance Bettencourt fills a vital need by delivering the essential guide that can put your business on the latest frontier of value creation.