The Service Challenge

This week, I like to start off with some thoughts on service fundamentals and their implications for service organizations.

Service organizations often find it challenging to develop, market and maintain service offerings. Unlike physical products, service offerings have 4 unique characteristics which many service organizations tend to disregard in their service planning, development and marketing.

What are they? Intangibility, Inseparability, Heterogeneity and Perishability.

Many academic books and articles have written about service characteristics and their unique attributes but yet service professionals often forgets these 4 fundamental attributes and it reflects in many service encounters that I have either experience professionally or on a personal basis.

I will comment on each characteristic in more details over the new few posts and hopefully shed some light on the importance of the 4 characteristic in service planning and delivery.

Interestingly, many physical products nowadays contain some elements of the 4 service characteristics. Take for example the notebook/laptop. In the past, functionality was one of the main critical consideration factor in most purchase decisions but look now at the vast variety of designs and customization that you can select to personalize your own machine.

Dell has always allowed consumers to customize system configuration such as hard disk space, processor type, RAM size etc. But now you can even choose the color of the front cover to tell the world that this is your very own.

What are consumers actually buying? The intangible and emotional experience of customizing and personalizing your own notebook/laptop, and when the product finally arrive at your doorstep, that satisfaction of using your own personalized machine.


Dell has also learnt that the consumer engagement does not ends here. The after sales support is essential to complete the purchase cycle and ensure that favorable experience leads to repeat purchases and brand loyalty.