Business services are the activities that benefit companies without supplying physical products. These services are essential to companies’ marketing, production, safety, cost and convenience purposes–especially for larger companies that need to keep up with work demands.
The business services industry is one of the largest service sectors in Europe, contributing 11% of GDP. It includes a wide range of industries, including technical services such as engineering and IT. Professional services such as legal, employment and facility management are also included in the sector.
Despite the fact that many industries sell physical products, there is a growing distinction between pure service and commodity good. This distinction is important because some businesses produce and sell goods that are intangible, but still have a significant value to customers. Examples of companies that provide pure services include airlines, computer service bureaus, law firms, plumbing repair and motion picture theaters.
In most cases, the primary business benefit that a company gets from a service is the ability to perform the task faster or more efficiently than it could if it were to do it in-house. For example, if a company needs a new website to be developed, it can hire someone else to do the work, reducing costs and time spent on the project.
When it comes to digital business services, the real potential is in connecting a system of engagement and action (the service transaction) with a system of insight (the data elements). In other words, if you can digitize an individual business service transaction, you can connect that transaction to the knowledge that it relies on or builds insight from, giving you more insights into your business and your customers’ behavior.
This means you need to create processes to ensure that you’re consistently capturing, maintaining, and disseminating the right information about your digital business services to ensure that you have the knowledge you need to provide them with high-quality and effective service. It also means that you need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your service delivery to determine where you can improve.
To get the most out of your digital business services, it’s a good idea to start with a small number of pilot use cases and frequently check in with your service consumers to understand their experience. You want to create a strong set of use cases that are based on a small number of common transactions, such as employee office moves or customer order modification. This will help you identify the right use cases and refine your process quickly.