Several times over the years we had customers ask about the difference between new product development (NPD) and new service development training or service creation as some refer to it. Let’s try to clarify the similarities and differences.
Fundamentally there is a difference in definition of product vs. service.
Let’s use a common definition and remember the distinction. A product is a tangible good that a customer can see, touch, feel, try on, taste or otherwise use. A service is intangible — something a customer experiences but doesn’t hold or retain.
If we take a telecom offer for example: Home Internet. This is both a product as well as a service.
From the product perspective key attributes would be speed of service, security features offered, modem with Wi-Fi, contract duration etc..
From the service perspective key attributes include quality of installation process, service reliability, help desk support and efficiency…
So in summary here are some of the key characteristics of each:
| Product | Service |
| Tangible | Intangible |
| Quality mainly defined by measure | Quality mainly defined by experience |
| Very repeatable (using manufacturing process) | Difficult to repeat (different person may perform the service task differently) |
Key consideration when it comes to a decision on how you will perceive your offer should really come from your choice of differentiation strategy. As we know there are 3 main ways to differentiate: best price, product quality & service quality.
If you are choosing to differentiate on product quality your focus should be on superb execution of product attributes, while if you are choosing to differentiate on service quality, you should focus on consistent execution of service quality attributes.
So now that we know this, how would the differences look in terms of actual new product development (NPD) process vs. new service development process.
The steps would be fairly similar – but the focus in terms of execution would be on different product or service elements.
| Product Focus | Service Focus |
| Market Research Stage:
– Focus on product attributes – Understand competitive product offers (speed, location, minutes allowance, download allowance…) |
Market Research Stage:
– Focus on service attributes – Understand competitive service offer (service levels, availability, SLA rebates, install process, reliability, help desk support process…) |
| Business Case and Product Requirements Stage:
– Capture costs of product attributes mainly – Pricing mainly based on product attributes – Functional product requirements mainly list product offer attributes |
Business Case and Product Requirements Stage:
– Capture costs of product as well as service attributes – Pricing mainly based on service attributes and in combination with product attributes – Functional requirements list product as well as service offer attributes |
| Design & Build Stage:
– Focus on platform for product delivery – Focus on speed, engineering reliability & availability |
Design & Build Stage:
– Focus on customer interaction steps (customer touch points) – Focus on quality of business processes to ensure consistency & repeatability |
Now we can go back to the question of training difference.
Assuming an organisation is aware of this, the training and staff focus should be driven by the overarching competitive strategy.
So the Best Service Development Training Courses should address your specific service development needs leveraging the above approach.
From the perspective of Parcus Group we can deliver both product development or service development training courses so feel free to contact us to discuss more.
You can see an example of our service development training course here: https://parcusgroup.com/public/downloads/Telecom-Service-Development-Training-Course.pdf
Also here are some other usefull service creation documents:
2. https://parcusgroup.com/public/downloads/Service_Creation_Boot_Camp_Training_Course.pdf
3. https://parcusgroup.com/public/downloads/Service_Creation_Tools_and_Templates.pdf
