Profiting From Services and Solutions by Brown Stephen W

Author:Brown, Stephen W....
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-07-31T18:26:51.725000+00:00

Chapter 6

Collaboration with Customers

Engaging Customers in Service and Solution Design, Development, and Delivery

VWR International is the world’s second largest laboratory supply and distribution company. It supplies its scientific laboratory customers with over 8,000 different items. VWR had become an expert in the myriad of activities associated with running a laboratory, but it struggled to differentiate itself from its competitors. After working closely with customers to design a robust set of services, VWR’s leaders realized that the company could capitalize on its customers’ interest in science and expertise in scientific research, facilities management, and operations. The company launched a new brand, “VWR Catalyst,” to collaborate with customers in reducing operating costs, increasing laboratory productivity, and adding value to the scientific process. In recent years, Catalyst has posted significant double-digit growth. You might call it a model “collaboratory.”

Software company Salesforce.com sees collaboration as a key to its future. Most of its major clients consider this fast-growing enterprise a business partner, but not a trusted adviser. By collaborating with its ­clients, Salesforce.com can discover how better to leverage its core competencies, develop its industry thought leadership in sales, and act in each client’s best longer-term interest, thereby establishing a reputation for trusted advisory services.

This chapter examines how companies such as VWR and Salesforce.com can collaborate more effectively with customers across the ­service continuum. We define customer collaboration as the involvement of customers in the process of generating ideas, designing, developing, producing, and delivering service and solution offerings. Our definition encompasses the process end to end, from idea generation, service improvement, and service or solution design through service delivery, service usage, troubleshooting, and feedback. This broad view of collaboration lines up with current, customer-defined views of service solutions1 and research on engaging customers in new service development.2 It also builds upon both traditional and contemporary views of new product development and service innovation.3

One of the fundamental premises and unique aspects of service management is that, in service production and consumption, the provider and the customer are often already collaborating to some degree.4 In some cases, customers co-produce services and realize their benefits simultaneously by enacting their relatively prescribed role, as in routine training or consulting sessions. In other cases, customers realize the true value of the service over time.5 For example, customers who signed up for Michelin’s “pay for kilometers” tire fleet solution or GE Healthcare’s imaging machine solutions experience the value of the service throughout its lifecycle; they pay for and co-create value with the provider when they use the products and equipment. In still other cases, service companies provide the facilities, the materials, and the guidance for the customers themselves to produce and deliver the needed solutions. At the extreme, this customer collaboration is a form of B2B self-service.6 Through their involvement, customers influence service productivity, service quality, and their own satisfaction, sometimes in unpredictable ways.7

The key questions are to what extent do we involve customers, in which stages of the process do we involve customers, which customers do we involve, and

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