Services are an increasingly important issue in the B2B/B2G high-tech company. They are at the same time vectors of growth, customer loyalty, profitability and recurrent turnover. Most high-tech B2B/B2G companies, like many others, are therefore seeking to develop their service activities.
The value of service activities in technology
Service activities are particularly interesting for several reasons:
- They are usually recurrent business, which is always interesting, but even more so in project-based businesses
- They can be more profitable than product activities, which are even more affected than they are by the continuous pressure of competitiveness and price cuts
- Relying either on human know-how or on significant investment in equipment (particularly IT) to deliver the service, or both, they are more difficult for competitors to imitate and set up barriers to entry.
The service strategy
Developing a services strategy means first and foremost having a strong will and deciding to allocate the necessary resources. This is not always self-evident in a corporate culture that is often historically marked by products or projects. The challenge of services is always clearly perceived at the level of top management but sometimes less clearly on the ground where there is a tendency to consider services as an ‘appendage’ of products, less prestigious and, all in all, secondary. The first condition for developing service activities in technology is therefore a very strong will on the part of top management.
This attitude from the field stems both in technology from a stronger interest in the new product than in the product in service among customers and also from an often long-standing history of basic service activities such as spare parts, repairs and maintenance, which sometimes prevents the extent to which services can be both innovative and drivers of growth and profitability.
Types of services in the B2B/B2G high-tech world
Services have developed considerably in the B2B/B2G high-tech world. They can be divided into different categories:
- Traditional customer support: spare parts, repair, maintenance
- Customer operations support:
- Taking care of the customer’s operations
- New digital services
In any technology company, the objectives will be both:
- Secure recurring business
- To increase the business of existing services, either on its own installed base or where possible on a base installed by the competition
- To develop and grow new services
- Sometimes to propose new service business models
- To make the best use of the possibilities offered by digital services
All technology services shall:
- Clearly define what service is being offered
- Clearly define the commitments and limits of the commitments made (the SLA)
- Be able to be delivered everywhere and at any time with the same level of quality: this will generally lead to a detailed definition of the “service process” that must be implemented (“industrialising the service”)
- Be capable of continuous improvement
- Be able to be monitored jointly with the customer to evaluate and improve the service level
It should be noted that increasingly, technological services are no longer only involved after or alongside product design. They are increasingly taken into account right from the design stage through the notion of product “serviceability”. For example, a product may incorporate a set of sensors for certain operating parameters right from the design stage, so that maintenance services can then be offered based on the feedback and processing of its operating data.
