4 Ways to Reinvent Service Delivery – an Evaluation

4 Ways to Reinvent Service Delivery – An Evaluation

As the authors say, “The challenge is to give managers a systematic way to question basic assumptions about how a service is defined and delivered and to see the opportunity to achieve dramatically better results.” The authors have provided 4 dimensions that an organization can broadly consider, in order to innovate or better the services they provide, while adding value to the customer experience as well as internally. These 4 dimensions have been evaluated in context of my current organization.

1. The Structure of the Interaction:

“The interaction between providers and clients can be configured in four ways: one provider with one client, one provider with multiple clients, multiple providers with one client, and multiple providers with multiple clients.”

As a professional in the Consulting & Staff Augmentation industry, we fall under the 4th category of ‘multiple providers with multiple clients’. Our clients in the IT industry have a bevy of providers offering similar services with little to no differentiation.

Since each client has specific requirements, and work on projects that might look similar on the outside to the layman but are vastly different in their internal design and processes, creating a shared experience, while offering ideas, does not add value to the specific project that is on a short-term deadline. As in the case of staff augmentation as well, we cannot afford the luxury of scheduling a shared interaction with multiple clients or providers, due to the nature of the short lifecycle of the project and the ever changing requirements that come our way. Privacy concerns are another line that we need to tread carefully on since the services we provide fall under confidentiality agreements and involve patents and copyrights that we cannot ignore.

Due to the factors mentioned, success through shared interaction, such as what Club Red has seen is tough to achieve in an industry such as ours.

2. The Service Boundary: The example of Citigroup bringing in an integration to bring their financing arm, the supplier and the customer on one platform to ease (as well as secure) the process is quite remarkable and I believe that it is a great way of providing a complementary service that benefits all the channels tremendously. At our firm, we do offer complementary services similar to the Citigroup portal, by having setup a module, through which our clients can specify their requirements through a pre-formatted form, and our employees can access these requirements in order to find projects to work on, which are a good match to their skill sets. While it is largely automated, we need continuous monitoring of the requirements that come in from our clients, so as to be able to provide them with a quick turnaround response time which helps