Don’t Become a Commodity Service

What separates you apart from competitors who are providing the same service as you? If you’re doing business as usual and your projects are in the “green” status, have good customer feedback, what else should you be doing to avoid becoming a commodity service for them that could be easily replaced? Here are some ideas: 

  • Continuously improve, innovate, offer new ideas, new ways of providing value and services, new consultative ways to solve problems, propose new solutions, show “what good looks like”, etc.  Have improvement plans in place that show what you’re improving, how it is progressing, etc. Customers are working with you and value your ideas and pro-activeness to make them better. Customer are actually eager to hear about those, they brought you to help, to consult, to offer new insights
  • Hackathons – do one internally with your team, or better yet, jointly with a customer so you can actually work on specific business use cases that will resonate and land with the customer to drive ROI and real value that is important for them
  • Create an Innovation Fund – For example, put X% of the value of the contract into the “fund” matched by the customer so you can engage in innovative, CXO, visible projects. This could also be used with discounts. Instead of discounting a certain percentage of the deal to the customer, put this money into the “fund” to be used for activities in this list
  • Create Innovation Programs, Run POCs, Pilots that demonstrate solving real challenges for the customer. Show innovative ways to solve a problem or introduce a new feature into the product, or ways to re-architect a problem, etc. 
    Explore as pilots, POCs emerging technologies e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RPA, Blockchain, etc.
  • Accelerators, IP – offer accelerators, IP to kick start new projects, accelerate new ways of doing projects, minimize time to market, increase re-usability 
  • Create Training Labs, Bench for your and customer team to learn new skills, be available to help in “burst” mode on specific projects, or shadow specific projects, or simply be ready for the next upcoming project ahead of time.

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