Fast Track

Is Your Firm on the Fastest Route to a Profitable Services Business?

Companies are responding to the present highly competitive business environment by looking for ways to differentiate and grow through robust service offerings. Adding them is a complex process, however, fraught with roadblocks and potholes. Professors Wolfgang Ulaga and Christian Kowalkowski have charted a twelve-step roadmap to service expansion in their new book, Service Strategy in …

From Products to Services and Solutions. Embracing Customer Centricity in B2B

Interview with Mary Jo Bitner and Stephen W. Brown, co-authors of the book “Profiting From Services and Solutions: What Product-Centric Firms Need to Know”. The interview was recorded in July, 2014, when the book first came out. Podcast Transcript This podcast was brought to you by the Center for Services Leadership, a ground-breaking research center …

Profiting from Services and Solutions

click on the slide to begin the webcast Leaders of product-based companies are under an enormous pressure to stay competitive by shifting revenues from selling goods to delivering services and solutions. Yet few executives realize the extent to which they must change their organizations to succeed in growth through services. In this webcast, Dr. Mary …

Show you care: initiating co-creation in service recovery

By Dr. Yingzi Xu Customers are no longer passive receivers of service offerings from companies, but rather value creators themselves. Companies realize that involving customers in service production and co-production is a cost-saving strategy and an effective way to satisfy customers. Co-production expands to co-design of new services as well as to co-recovery, which allows companies …

How Customer Participation in B2B Peer-to-Peer Problem Solving Communities Influences the Need for Traditional Customer Service

By Sterling Bone Can peer-to-peer interactions in a customer support community reduce the need for one-on-one traditional customer support service? New research sponsored by Arizona State’s Center for Services Leadership and published in the Journal of Service Research (JSR) attempts to address this question. Firms that leverage the collective wisdom and knowledge in their customer …

Development of New B2B Solutions: Results of a Benchmarking Survey

Earlier this year Solutions Insights Inc. conducted a benchmarking survey designed to better understand the issues that B2B companies face in developing new solutions. The survey explored the following questions: •    Current importance and relevance of solutions •    Identification of the stakeholders who are involved •    Key processes required •    The level of process standardization …