Service Analytics: Leveraging Data Across Enterprise Boundaries for Competitive Advantage

The modern view on services focuses on the co-creation of value between providers and customers—leveraging knowledge, skills, and resources of both partners from an overall system point of view. This perspective goes beyond the typical customer integration in a traditional services context, thereby leading professional services firms to quickly adopt new methods to exploit this potential. This includes capturing, processing, and analyzing data produced by multiple actors within a services system with the objective to support strategy implementations and drive complex decisions—an area which we call “service analytics” in this paper. We describe the nature of service analytics and outline its distinctiveness with regard to business analytics. We subsequently provide a typology of its approaches based on the different types of data available in services systems. We finally illustrate the potential of service analytics by means of two application scenarios: customer intimacy analytics focusing on the service encounter as well as demand and inventory analytics which are concerned with customer usage.