Article at a glance:

Improving productivity in product services

• Product companies are struggling to reduce the cost of the services operations that support and maintain their product lines.
• Unlike manufacturers, which can optimize controllable processes, services organizations have to manage many variables, including unique requests, challenging environments, and differing levels of employee motivation.
• Still, companies can improve the productivity of their services by reducing the demand for service work, assigning the least costly resources to tasks, and boosting labor output.
• Contrary to many executives' fears, improving productivity in these ways usually raises rather than lowers customer satisfaction.