The Services
The offer of services can take two routes. One is founded on a good knowledge of customer characteristics stemming from various surveys. The company is thus able to master and control the development of a service policy. To define possible services, the risk approach applied to a customer segment can be used. Customer activity can thus be broken down. Technical risks, linked to the availability of products and services, can be identified. This can be linked to customer know-how and use of the products and services, and also to the financial risks that should be listed in order of importance for the customer (veto, important, secondary). A range of services can be presented for each risk thus identified. As this work is conducted on a group of customers (a market segment), risks are defined by the fact that they are common to all concerned customers. We may then speak of 'generic risks', which more or less corresponds to the concept of incurred risk. The concept of perceived risk is not used here, as it refers to the situation of an individual customer only.
The second approach to define the service offer involves leaving as much room as possible for the development of interaction with the customer. The choice of developing a particular service happens case by case. A structuring and reinforcement of the developed skills follows in order to build a capacity to offer the new service to other customers. The aim is to create a service offer through a pilot operation, which the company will then rationalise. In this instance, the company chooses adaptation as a development strategy.