The introduction of innovative new services helps firms to survive in the industry and succeed in their operations. The process enables businesses to increase their market shares, improve performance outcomes and adapt to various market situations in which they operate. In addition, the launch of new services is critical in the identification and creation of new markets and raising legitimacy among rivals as well as consumers. Firms such as Bank of America test their potential new services by focusing on small-scale versions of their ideas and getting responses from targeted customers (Csikósová, Čulková & Janošková 2016). Bank of America has been at the forefront of developing innovative new products to increase its market share, and it has always been testing them on a small-scale basis.
This bank scaled down a large project to represent its idea, which took a shorter period and less money to implement. For instance, when the bank intended to launch mobile banking, it designed and executed the project on a small-scale basis to test its feasibility. Upon launching the small project in the market, the management evaluated the feedback of customers to establish the extent to which they could appreciate and utilize mobile banking. It was upon being convinced that the project would increase the bank’s market share that it was introduced on large scale. The management of these large financial institutions holds the view that it is rather expensive to go wrong on the large scale (Chorafas, Steinmann & Steinman 2016). This essay describes the key considerations when testing new services as well as provides alternative techniques that a firm can use to achieve similar goals.
When management teams of firms want to test new services in the market, they consider the expectations, processes, resources, and test tools. Most management teams in businesses expect that the testing of new products would be quick and cheap. This should be managed in a way that an organization can monitor and analyze the day-to-day outcomes of a project. The high-level approach to testing new products should be adopted. In the case of Bank of America, the test manager approached senior management and stakeholders to have their input in the project. They committed their support for the idea to introduce mobile banking. By signing off the innovative new service testing document, the senior stakeholders in the organization assured the implementation team that they would offer the necessary resources to the ongoing investment (Chorafas, Steinmann & Steinman 2016).
A test plan document was developed to include the details of all expectations of all the stakeholders critical to the success of the service testing. The involved managers should analyze processes in new product testing. For instance, the management in the case of Bank of America’s testing of new mobile banking service understood the processes involved, which typified by automation (Chen et al. 2018). Computer systems executed these processes upon receiving customer requests. Resources are important components for any new service testing by financial institutions. Various projects require varying amounts of resources based on their complexity levels. To launch the mobile banking service, Bank of America’s senior stakeholders gave the assessing team both financial and human resources that were critical in establishing the appropriate test environment. Several expected outcomes are achieved by utilizing different test tools. In the case of Bank of America, the tools ranged from packaged to open applications to support remote banking. It is important to state that all the applications were characterized by distinct cost and support implications (Chorafas, Steinmann & Steinman 2016; Csikósová, Čulková & Janošková 2016).
Instead of a firm developing its services and launching them to the market for testing, it might adopt alternative techniques to achieve similar goals. One of the techniques is analyzing what has proved workable with similar organizations in an industry. For instance, a bank may decide to assess the extent to which its consumers may adopt its mobile banking service based on the results from Bank of America. Another alternative that a company may use to test whether customers may overwhelmingly receive its new products is the use of online surveys. These tools provide important information that a firm can analyze to test the acceptability level of an innovative new service (Chen et al. 2018). If a company finds out that potential customers would not uptake the service, then it focuses on ways of improving it. In the context of using these surveys, management teams should utilize samples that represent the entire target population (Chorafas, Steinmann & Steinman 2016).
In conclusion, a business organization launches goods and services to expand its market share as well as gain a competitive advantage. Bank of America successfully tested its new mobile banking service on a small-scale basis to determine the acceptability level among customers as well as any issues that could arise from the innovative product. To test a new service, large firms such as Bank of America should consider four critical factors that are the expectations, processes, resources, and test tools. Alternatives that firms can use to achieve similar goals concerning testing new services are online surveys and learning from what has been implemented by business rivals in the same sector.
Reference List
Chen, CK, Zhang, ZK, Lee, SH & Shieh, S 2018, ‘Penetration testing in the IoT age’, Computer, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 82-85.
Chorafas, DN, Steinmann, H & Steinman, H 2016, Expert systems in banking: a guide for senior managers, Springer, New York, NY.
Csikósová, A, Čulková, K & Janošková, M 2016, ‘Evaluation of quantitative indicators of marketing activities in the banking sector’, Journal of Business Research, vol. 69, no. 11, pp. 5028-5033.