Service Innovation: The Next Big Thing

Last week I spoke to Chris Bucholz from InsideCRM about what I call “Service Innovation”. Chris wrote a great article as a result of that interview and you can read it here.

I have been thinking about this a lot: Most companies focus much of their creativity on the products they sell, not the service they provide.

This means that 90% of the innovation in the world is product innovation. This makes sense, right?  After all, without great innovative products that people can buy…in most cases…who needs service…?

But long term very few companies can provide a sustainably great product without great service and it doesn’t matter whether you are Dell or Apple or Cisco or Delta Airlines or GE. The fact of the matter is that you need to interact with the customers long after they bought your product in order to make them truly happy, to keep them loyal and positive, to keep them coming back.

And this is where most companies get it wrong and why I believe that there is a great untapped opportunity here and that the next big wave of innovation could easily be Service Innovation…

Imagine if companies like Apple focused an equal part of their brain power on innovating their service, not just their iPhones.  The result could be an iPhone grade revolution in customer service!

Wouldn’t that be interesting? Wouldn’t that be nice?

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