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Business services are a recognisable subset of economic services, and share their characteristics. The essential difference is that businesses are concerned about the building of service systems in order to deliver value to their customers and to act in the roles of service provider and service consumer.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called unique characteristics of services dominated much of the literature. The four most commonly cited characteristics of services are: [21] Intangibility – services lack physical form; they do not interact with any of our senses in a conventional way, they cannot be touched or held.
A restaurant waiter is an example of a service-related occupation. A service is an act or use for which a consumer, company, or government is willing to pay. [1] Examples include work done by barbers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, banks, insurance companies, and so on.
Goods can be returned while a service, once delivered cannot. [4] Goods are not always tangible and may be virtual e.g. a book may be paper or electronic. Marketing theory makes use of the service-goods continuum as an important concept [5] which "enables marketers to see the relative goods/services composition of total products". [6]
A public service may sometimes have the characteristics of a public good (being non rivalrous and non excludable), but most are services which may (according to prevailing social norms) be under-provided by the market. In most cases public services are services, i.e. they do not involve manufacturing of goods.
Only low-contact services produced in the "backroom" (e.g., check clearing) can be provided away from the customer. Perishable. Since services are perishable, they cannot be stored for later use. In manufacturing companies, inventory can be used to buffer supply and demand.
Extensions of the four P's are often included in cases such as services marketing where unique characteristics (i.e. intangibility, perishability, heterogeneity and the inseparability of production and consumption) warrant additional consideration factors.
Services constitute over 50% of GDP in low income countries and as their economies continue to develop, the importance of services in the economy continues to grow. [2] The service economy is also key to growth, for instance it accounted for 47% of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 2000–2005 (industry contributed 37% and agriculture 16% in the same period). [2]