The move towards service-centric delivery

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3rd of February 2015 Article by Peter Ankerstjerne

Peter Ankerstjerne, head of group marketing at global facilities services provider ISS, contributes his first blog to the ECJ website. He writes the transition towards service-centric delivery requires that FM providers focus on three elements: intangibility, customer integration and the heterogeneity of services.

Companies like Amazon spend very little time on traditional marketing and branding. Instead, they focus on developing a user experience that exemplifies their brand whether it is technology, distribution capabilities etc. In the end it is the totality of the user experience that sells the brand.

As such, in a fast-changing, increasingly competitive, globalised economy, expect organisational changes to affect the workplace. Ensuring that the workplace continues to contribute to the core organisations' strategic objectives will be the key to determine the quality of FM providers' service offering towards 2020.

The workplace is essentially part of a 'total value' ecosystem where organisations can shape the experience that customers and employees have when interacting. Therefore, the workplace must be true to both the experience and the message.

Service-centric delivery

The transition towards service-centric delivery in workplace management requires that FM providers focus on three elements: intangibility, customer integration, and the heterogeneity of services. Towards 2020, FM providers will have to create and communicate a sense of trust in their abilities to build productive, innovative workplaces that fully supports core organisations' strategic ambitions. These three areas will continue to pose opportunities and challenges for FM providers towards 2020 and beyond.

• Intangibility - FM services are customer experiences and cannot be judged according to the same criteria as normal tangible goods.

• Customer integration - FM services in the future cannot be provided without extensive customer integration and even co-creation, where customers co-create and co-provide services. The issue for FM providers is to balance varying levels of customer integration, which can vary greatly across different FM segments and by the types of services being offered. Some services require little customer involvement, while others are highly customer-centric.

• Heterogeneity - Ensuring consistent service quality in the face of service heterogeneity remains a key challenge for FM providers. Services become heterogeneous because they are performed by humans (performance can vary daily), and because customers' requirements can change over time in a hyper-competitive, global economy.

To be on the leading edge of providing customer-centric services, FM providers must be aware of the challenges that core organisations face and in order to do this, they need to become experience managers as well combining the ability to express the values of the organisation with the design of the office environments to respond to these new challenges.

It will be this understanding that will permit FM providers to deliver better management of FM processes, experiences, personnel and relationships with customers and end-users towards a service-centric delivery.