ISS 2020 Vision Future of Service Management | Page 45

organizations attract customers and also help them recruit, integrate, and retain talent. they
drives employee engagement, productivity, and, ultimately, service excellence. 43
Ideology plays an important role in shaping the direction of the Service Management field,
where users buy into the technology, company or service because of what it stands for – the
vision and business journey.
This is equally important for work culture and current or potential employees. 44
Immaterialization helps organizations set their vision, mission and values. Employees are
increasingly seeking workplaces with cultures that align with the ideological inclinations
of their employers, customers and partners. This includes placing a greater emphasis on
things like social responsibility, social innovation and environmental sustainability – these
are new dimensions of the purchasing decision framework. Interview subject-matter experts
highlighted the challenge:
Sometimes getting the people with the right attitude is the hardest. It is important to
make sure that you not only hire for the right attitude, but make sure that people’s
personalities will fit in with your culture. There’s an old school saying, “you hire for
attitude, and you train for skill.” But the next level is to determine what your culture
is, and are you hiring people whose personality fits in this culture? 45
Environmental sustainability, energy efficiency and cost-effective resource management is a
cross-cutting theme when it comes to the future of Service Management. Service providers
will increasingly be expected to act with a degree of environmental responsibility and pursue
innovation in the area of sustainability. At the same time, services should be human-centric,
reflecting a greater emphasis on balanced living among the populous and actively promoting
health and wellness to a greater extent. For example, this involves designing offices with
“worktivity” amenities, such as running tracks or other social and play areas. 46
The competition on delivering experiences and servicing immaterial needs leads to service
commoditization. To avoid the service commodization trap, organizations continually push
higher up the economic value chain. Just as service markets build on goods markets, which
in turn build on commodity markets, so do the experience and transformation markets
build on commoditized services. The emergence of the transformation economy follows
a logical progression of economic value (see figure 14). Since services themselves can be
commoditized, there needs to be more economic value elsewhere. The basis of the experience
or transformation economy is that value is created by the end-user, the aspirant, with the
business acting as a guide. 47
43 Andersen, M.K. and Ankerstjerne, P., Service Management 3.0, White Paper, 2014.
44 Groen, B. Williams, A. Mitchell, T., ISS 2020 Vision: Future of Service Management, 2016.
45 Hyken, S. ISS 2020 Vision: Future of Service Management, 2016.
46 ISS World Services, ISS 2020 Vision: Future of Outsourcing and Perspectives for Facility Management, White Book, 2015.
47 CIFS, Trends for Tomorrow, Members’ Report 3, 2013.
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