The transition from product-based economies to service-based economies has largely been a success over time, but the journey wasn’t always smooth. In large part, that’s because service-focused businesses demand different management tools and techniques that aren’t necessarily intuitive for entrepreneurs trying to maneuver through a changing marketplace.
But, having seen success and failures, we can be a bit smarter now in how we approach service-for-hire businesses with the goal of steady growth in mind. There are 5 things in particular that must be done right in order to form the foundation of a solid service provider:
- The offering
The first and perhaps most obvious thing vendors need to get right is the thing they’re offering the general public. This used to be mostly products; today, it’s mostly services and offering a good service means providing a good experience to customers rather than an object of value.
For products, this concept was very straight forward: make sure your product works well and fills some need or desire that gives it a niche in the market. For services, “getting it right” is a bit more ambiguous. How do you quantify right, and who is it right for? The most important thing to know is that you can’t and shouldn’t be good at everything. Take some time to understand what qualities are important to your customer base. If convenience is what you’re good at and what your customers want, you don’t have to have the best prices on the market. With time, you can explore how to branch out to meet the needs of other segments of the public, but to start out, a provider’s core offering needs to be properly targeted and prioritized.
- The funding mechanism
Okay, you know what you’re good at and you aim to excel in that area above all others. Now it’s time to figure how to fund that excellence and this is another critical aspect to get just right. One way is the direct approach: make your customers pay for your services and do it best to make it fair. If you’re good at convenience and have made it a top priority to be open for business on the weekends, how do you cover the cost of that extra time you’re open? Probably by a slight increase in price for your customers.
In some cases, you can be creative and find other ways to cover your costs, keeping your services cheap for consumers while offering the same great service or even better. This depends a lot on your level of creativity and imagination, but could yield excellent results and set you apart from your competition in all kinds of unique ways.
- The employee management system
A lot of offering a great service relies of maintaining a great workforce. Yes, employees should be motivated, encouraged and have room to grow. But this doesn’t magically happen as the result of whatever positive energy you can drum up in the workplace. As a business manager, it’s up to you to make sure your employees have everything they need to succeed.
First and foremost, that means hiring the right people for your business. If your strong point is friendly interaction with customers, you don’t necessarily need college graduates, you need someone who loves to smile. It also means providing your employees with good training and making sure that the inner workings of your business aren’t demanding the impossible from them.
- The customer management system
In the service industry, your customers often become part of your workforce (think self-checkout counters at the grocery store or online check in for airlines). The key question to get this right is how best to influence the behavior of your customers. Discounts and other incentives can be used to get your customers to put out that extra little bit of effort you’re asking them.
One big no-no, however: never expect your clients to do what a well-trained employee ought to be doing. That line isn’t always clear, but when in doubt, use reason. If the online check in process hadn’t been made so easy, no one would expect travelers to do it at all. We all remember the quick clickety-clack of airline agents who used to deal with complex internal systems to book you on flights and get you checked in.
- Integrating the elements
Here, unfortunately, there is no smoking gun. Every business is unique and the first 4 things on this list must be integrated in a unique way to make for the managing of an entire business entity completely different than any other. While there are no specific guiding principles here, it is absolutely crucial that the elements of your service business gel together well and complement one another.
One way to tackle some of the issues touched on by these 5 points is getting your business listed on YINC. YINC has created a unique blockchain-based model to connect customers directly to vendors online. The service-based businesses save money by using YINC, since they don’t have to make the same kind of efforts to reach customers — customers come to them. What’s more, YINC eliminates anxiety over fake and skewed online reviews for businesses. Every review on YINC is real, honest and unalterable, so you don’t need to spend any time or resources making sure you look better than your competition in online reviews. Small and new businesses get to enjoy fair competition that doesn’t depend on how much they pay be ranked or rated higher.
There are always unique and creative ways to make sure your service company is getting these five things just right. A tool like YINC can certainly help but in the end it’s up to you. You know your business better than anyone and you must decide what’s best for it.