In today's economy, service is no longer just a feature that may or may not be incorporated to attract more customers. It is such a central decision in the company that a service strategy can become its differentiator from the competition and thus achieve high competitiveness.
In the book "Marketing and service management", Christian Grönroos explains that a company can adopt one of these four strategies that will guide the decision-making process. They are: technical quality strategy, pricing strategy, image strategy and service strategy. I will briefly explain to you what each one refers to, and then explain why the service strategy is so important in today's reality.
A technical quality strategy is based on offering the customer the best technical solution for their need. This would be the case of a medical clinic that provides the best facilities, qualified medical personnel and the most modern diagnostic equipment.
A pricing strategy is based on offering the lowest cost to the customer. It would be a medical clinic that maintains the cheapest rates on the market.
The image strategy bases its advantage on an additional one in the client's imaginary, formed through advertising and the media. If the clinic has managed, through an aggressive advertising campaign, to be in the minds of the entire population as the most reliable health solution, or as the one in which celebrities are cared for, etc. This makes clients come with a superior positive image, influenced not by their experience of having served there, but by the communication received through the media.
Finally, a service strategy is based on incorporating a series of additional services to the basic offer, in order to increase the relationship with customers. It would be the case that the clinic incorporates a personalized follow-up to each patient during a period after their discharge, or that it sends information related to their health problem, to achieve the best possible preventive actions through the lifestyle of the patient. patient.
Why is a service strategy so powerful today?
- Well, on the one hand, it allows new market competitors to enter without having a formed image, which costs a lot of time and permanence in the social imagination, also because it is a strategy that does not degrade the profitability of the company, as it can do, for example, the pricing strategy, at which point it may come that profit margins decrease so much that it is impossible to continue competing. On the contrary, the services strategy is based on adding more value to the basic offer, making it possible to increase margins. Finally, it is a difficult strategy to imitate. Since it is based on increasing the relationship with customers through offering them more service, it is focusing on how the service is offered, and not so much on what is offered,which is more related to the technical quality of the solution provided to the customer. The latter, on the other hand, may be an advantage at the time of innovation (the first clinic to have a team of tomographies of a given technology), but over time, it is only a matter of other clinics deciding to make such investment and the advantage disappears.
With this I would like to invite you to review what is the dominant strategy in your company. What are you basing your competitive advantage on? And what results are you achieving with it? Perhaps it is time to turn things around, since the conditions of the environment are constantly changing and current trends can take you in another direction than those of a few years or decades ago.
To finish, I will tell you a real case. A tire vendor had submitted a proposal to a potential customer, priced significantly lower than that customer's current supplier, and with similar product quality. When meeting with him to see what he thought, he asked if they could make immediate tire changes anywhere they needed it within a certain geographical area. The answer was negative. "This is the difference for which I prefer to pay more to my current supplier," and was the reason why he decided not to accept the new proposal.
Forceful, right? To think about the scale that services acquire for today's customers.
