We ran out of ice-melting salt a couple of days ago, thanks to the second snowstorm and Arctic blast in the Chicago area. My wife decided to grab one from the nearest Ace Hardware and found their customer service to be excellent. We have primarily experienced Home Depot’s customer service, so our bar was not high. But apparently, the people at local Ace Hardware were really amiable and helpful. After all, their tagline is “The Helpful Place”.

As I was driving later in the day, a thought came across my mind- if you are a service-oriented organization, helpfulness, and friendliness are obviously critical; however, there are other ingredients, too. What exactly can be a comprehensive list of those ingredients. So, I decided to do some reading on the topic.

So when I came back home, I decided to dig out a textbook from almost two decades back, “Operations Management for Competitive Advantage” by Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano. Honestly, I did not do enough justice to the book back in 2004 when I was pursuing my MBA in India. But I decided to keep the book, with a few other books. And when I mysteriously developed an appetite for re-learning, the book came in handy, and I still refer to it sometimes.

Anyway, I did remember that there was a chapter or section on service management. And behold, there was one. And with little effort, I could find the information I was seeking. In chapter 7 of the book “Service Process Selection And Design”, the authors have identified six key focus areas for service strategy:

• Staff friendliness and helpfullness
• Speed and convenience of service delivery
• Service pricing
• Service variety
• Quality of the tangible goods that are central to or accompany the service
• Unique skills that constitute the service offering

Analytics can help across all the critical focus areas, including human-human interaction. And this is precisely why analytics can play a crucial role in defining your service strategy. While you can write an entire book around the approaches that can be leveraged across these six focus areas, we will use the common-sense overview approach.

Friendliness and helpfulness in human-to-human interaction

This is where analytics is already widely leveraged to refine service strategy. The quest to understand “what customers want” leverages analytics heavily to find answers. With more advanced analytics, specifically deep learning, companies can find patterns and associations in their customer behavior data that they did not know existed. Every such insight can help fine-tune the dynamics of staff interaction, thereby helping you develop a more robust service strategy. An example is establishing a process as part of your service strategy that helps associates obtain some valuable insights about the customers. These insights can then help the associates personalize their interactions.

Speed and convenience of delivery

This is another area where analytics is already leveraged extensively. E-commerce giants like Amazon offer same-day delivery in many regions cost-efficiently, thanks to the power of leveraging data. Whether it is a supermarket or retail banking, analytics can help insert speed and convenience into your service strategy. An example is designing optimal checkout lines at supermarkets or the optimal number of teller windows in a bank branch.

We will cover the role of analytics in developing insights on the following service strategy factors in the second part of this article.

• Service pricing
• Service variety
• Quality of the tangible goods that are central to or accompany the service
• Unique skills that constitute the service offering

The second part will be published on 01/16.