Service is taking action to create value for someone else. What kind of value will your service create?
The Four Categories of Value ™ gives us a useful framework to answer this essential question.
First: Primary Product, including design, materials, craftsmanship, features, price, ability to customize and connect.
Primary Product can also be a service. For example, an accurate diagnosis or correct terms in a legal contract.
Primary Product comes first. And it is essential that you get this right.
Second: Delivery Systems, including face to face, online, mobile, 24/7, overnight, digital, instant download, upload, and sharing. Delivery Systems include scheduling, ordering, tracking.
Delivery Systems create value when they are easy, fast, and convenient. Delivery Systems destroy value when they are slow, buggy, inaccurate, or simply hard to use.
Third: Service Mindset, including being patient, helpful, friendly, concerned, or compassionate.
Service Mindset is experienced through tone of voice, choice of words, sharing eye-contact, using body-language, or giving generously of your time.
Fourth: Ongoing Relationship, which means not just completing a transaction, closing a ticket, or sealing a deal. Ongoing Relationship means caring about a customer or a colleague; committing to their well-being, anticipate their needs, helping them to create the future they want to achieve.
Ongoing Relationship requires that you listen to appreciate someone else’s ambitions, goals, hopes, and dreams, to understand their anxieties, worries, and fears. Then taking action to make an offer or recommendation, taking action to make and keep promises, taking action to review, revise, follow up and follow through.
The definition of service is taking action to create value for someone else. Creating value is not what you do, it is the benefit, the experience, and the value that someone else receives.
What VALUE will you create with your service today?