Business services are a broad category of businesses that support business goals while helping to connect a company with its customers. These services are often specialized and require professionals, special equipment and expertise to achieve their set goals.
Service Design: The Best Practices of Managers
One important characteristic that distinguishes business services from other types of companies is their emphasis on the delivery of value to customers. This means that a successful service-based company must deliver on all four of its elements of service design, which are: customer needs and wants, organizational capability to deliver the service, internal processes that make the service available to customers and the pricing model that determines how much a customer is willing to pay for a service.
In many service industries, the price of a service is determined by the market, rather than by a set of fixed costs. This may lead to a significant degree of variation among competitors, and thus can be an important factor in attracting new customers and maintaining existing ones.
The Cost of Business Services
When a company outsources work that does not fall within its specific area of expertise, it relies on business services to help complete those tasks. Since the worth of these services is intangible, they can be more affordable than hiring an in-house staff to perform that task.
Shared Services: Benefits of Consolidating Functions
The most common type of shared services is the management of human resources (HR). By combining HR functions such as employee onboarding, benefits administration and payroll processing into one department, businesses can achieve efficiencies in these areas while reducing overall operational costs.
Another popular example is finance shared services, in which businesses combine accounting, finance, cash management, debt issuance and other financial operations into one department to improve efficiency, reduce cost and improve performance.
Other types of shared services include IT infrastructure, IT support and application development. By bringing these functions under the umbrella of a single department, businesses can provide IT’s customer base with standardized processes, tools and data that supports better service.
These services can be delivered over the internet, and many come with call forwarding, voicemail, conferencing, and other features. They also can transmit calls over mobile phones or other devices, so employees can communicate without using a landline.
Aside from lowering costs and improving service, shared services also enable better control and insight into the operations of business departments. By putting information about the operations of these departments in a centralized location, businesses can more easily identify problems and respond to issues before they become major problems.
How Business Services Can Be A Career Path
As the name suggests, business services can be a very rewarding career option for people with a wide range of skills and qualifications. The industry is a diverse hub of opportunities, and you can choose a sub-category that interests you to begin your career in this field.
You can start off as an intern, or you can even start your own business in the service industry and pitch companies with your specific skill sets and expertise. Once you have your own business, you can develop a range of service offerings to your customers, and it can be a great way to build a reputation for providing high-quality services to your clients.