Products and Services

In the first module we talked about the importance of getting to know the business you work in. You looked at its purpose, values, organisational structure and legal structure.

It is also important to have some knowledge of the products and services the business provides to its customers.

Doing so may mean that you are able to answer questions about the products or services from customers who call, email, or visit the office, rather than needing to pass them on to someone else.

Showing a real interest in what the business does shows your colleagues that you care about what they do and want to be part of the team.

Furthermore, building your own knowledge of the products and services may also lead you to other jobs in the organisation. It is not uncommon for administration professionals to move into technical roles based on their excellent organisational skills and the product or service knowledge they have gained on the job.

Opportunities to Build Product or Service Knowledge

There are plenty of ways to build your knowledge of the products your business sells or services it offers, such as:

• Your organisation’s website, especially where the business sells products or clearly defined services, for instance an electrical services business that installs solar panels and EV chargers.
• Where the business is a distributor (it sells products made by others):
  • the manufacturers’ websites are a good place to start looking for product information and reviews.
  • you may find video “walk-arounds” and reviews on YouTube
  • you may find useful information on review sites like Trustpilot, Clutch, G2, or Google Reviews.
• Your business may run product or service familiarisation sessions when new products or services are released. While these may be targeted at sales and marketing staff, if they are open to the wider business, they could be worth attending.

Taking Care When Providing Product or Service Advice

While it is great to be able to help potential customers by sharing product or service information, take care to only comment on aspects you are certain about.

If you provide incorrect information, it could lead to confusion or a customer buying a product or service that doesn’t meet their needs, for which they may need to be refunded. The Fair Trading Act 1986 protects customers from misleading information. The customer is entitled to a full refund if “the product doesn't match the seller's description” (Consumer Protection, no date).

Some industries have additional consumer protections. For example, people providing financial advice must operate under a business that is licensed to do so, must be registered, and must stick to the relevant code of conduct.

If your business is involved in financial services or another controlled industry, speak to your team leader or manager and ask them to explain what advice you can and cannot give to customers.

Each organisation relies on goods and services provided by other people and businesses. They are referred to as suppliers.

Goods and services that are used to create the products or services your organisation sells will probably be managed by another business team. But there are a range of other things that are needed to keep the business running smoothly. This is what we cover in this topic.

Common Product and Service Needs of an Office

The following goods and services are commonly needed to keep an office running smoothly:

• Products:
  • stationary
  • courier tickets
  • tea, coffee, hot chocolate, milk, biscuits, and fruit
  • toiletries such as toilet paper, paper hand towels, and sanitary products
  • first aid kits and civil defence cabinets
  • staff ID cards
  • office furniture
  • phones
  • computers and peripherals, such as printers, webcam, headsets.
• Services:
  • courier collection and delivery
  • rubbish, recycling, and compost collection
  • laundry services (replacement tea towels)
  • cleaning
  • after hours security and alarm response
  • office plant care and maintenance
  • electrical testing of computers and appliances (“test and tag”)
  • software provided as a service (commonly called software as a service, or SaaS)
  • coffee machine servicing
  • general building maintenance
  • heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), security system, plumbing, and electrical repairs
  • secure destruction services and/or offsite archiving
  • building inspections for building warrant of fitness
  • fire evacuation drills for compliance with regulations.

Some businesses will engage an external IT service provider to assist with computer and printer configuration, computer networking and helpdesk support, while others may have dedicated staff to perform these tasks.

Part of your role as an administrator is to take note of situations where:

• products or services are not being supplied, but should be, such as:
  • by not having them, your business is non-compliant
  • by not having them, your business is less efficient than it could otherwise be
• the products or services being supplied aren’t up to standard
• a product is reaching the end of its useful life
• a service is coming to the end of its contract.

In all of these cases, you should raise the issue with your team leader or manager. They might ask you for your recommendation of how to solve the problem.

Let’s look at how to go about determining what are the best products or services for your business and how to make recommendations to your team leader or manager.

Step 1: Determining Evaluation Criteria

Start by working out:

• What information do you need to provide?
  • Who is your audience?
    • Is your team leader or manager going to make the decision, or will it need to go to a more senior decision maker?
  • What format do the recommendations need to be in?
    • Can it be verbal? Will an email suffice? Or does it need to be a written report?
  • Do any policies apply?
    • Some organisations require three formal quotes when comparing products or services over a certain dollar value. If you are unsure, ask your team leader or manager.
• How long can you spend on this task?
  • Ask your team leader or manager if you are unsure how much time and effort you should put into this.

The following table shows the most common audience, format, and time taken to for a recommendation, depending on the value of the product or service.

	Low-cost products or services	Moderately-expensive products or services	High-cost products or services
Audience / decision-maker	Your team leader	Your manager or their manager	A senior manager or senior leadership team
Format	Verbal, or email	Short written report with quotes	Business case*
Time taken to form a recommendation	Short – hours	Moderate – days	Long – weeks or months

_{* Note that business case writing is generally done by a technical specialist or manager, so it is outside the scope of this programme.}

Identify What Is Important

Next, work out the most important benefits that the product or service must provide in order for it to address the issue you’re facing.

This may be obvious, or it may require you to go and speak to the people most affected and use that information to identify the benefits. For instance, if the contents of the first aid kits are expired, it would be a good idea to speak to nominated first aiders to understand what supplies are used most often. You may also want to speak to a health and safety representative to see if the current first aid kit contents are appropriate for highest-rated risks.

We are talking about identifying benefits rather than features, this is because benefits focus on what the product or service can do, while features relate to the technical specifications. For example, here are some features of a wifi router and the benefits they create:

Features	Benefits
MU-MIMO and OFDMA for communication across twelve wifi 6 spatial streams.	Eliminates wifi dead spots Can carry four times as much data so it won’t slow down when lots of people are using the internet at the same time

Benefits make sense to most people, while features require more product knowledge to make sense of. Sometimes you may need to list features, for example “the desk must be 1200mm wide”, or “the laptop must have a hard drive capacity of at least 512Gb”.

Prioritise What Is Important

Make a list of the benefits and features you think are most important, and prioritise them. We refer to these benefits and features as criteria. The term criteria means standards which you can use to judge or decide if something meets your requirements. The singular noun of criteria is criterion. In other words you can list one criterion, or many criteria, about a product or service.

For example, let’s assume the dishwasher in your office has stopped working. You’ve had an electrician inspect it and they’ve told you it needs to be replaced. Your manager has asked you to recommend the best product. You’ve spoken with your colleagues and asked what benefits they think a replacement should have, and you’ve made the following list:

• Non-negotiable: Have a quick cycle (90 min or less)
• High: Be large enough to cope with current and future staffing, estimated at 50 staff
• High: Clean all but the dirtiest products the first time around
• High: Reputable brand with local service agent
• Medium: Be energy and water efficient
• Medium: Be easy to use
• Medium: Have plenty of space for cups, plates, bowls and cutlery – pots and pans not necessary
• Low: Dry cleaned items, including plastic ones, thoroughly
• Low: Fit in existing space if possible (unlikely, considering current and future staffing)

Confirm your list of benefits with your team leader or manager before moving on to the next step. In some cases your team leader or manager will give you a budget to stick to. If this is the case, add this to your list as a high priority item.

Step 2: Researching Options

Now that you know what the product or service needs to do, you can start looking at options.

When investigating products your business may buy or services that it may contract, use a similar approach as you did when looking at products or services your business provides:

• manufacturers’ websites
• review sites like Trustpilot, Clutch, G2, or Google Reviews on the manufacturer’s website
• YouTube video reviews.

You might also like to speak to colleagues, family, and friends to seek their opinions and experiences with the product or service you are looking for.

Locally Sourced Products and Services

Once you have done some basic research, it can be a good idea to go and speak to local businesses that supply the product or service you are looking for. Buying local means you are more likely to receive good after-sales service, which is particularly important for appliances, vehicles and machines.

Software As a Service

If you are looking to buy a subscription to a software service, such as Google Workspace, Monday.com, Whimsical, or Roll, review the product’s website to learn about its benefits and features.

Most offer a free trial period – usually between 7 and 30 days long – although you may need a credit card to sign-up. Others have a free plan that does not expire, but these plans have limited features. However, they give you the chance to see if the software is easy to use, and if you do find that you need extra features:

• you may be able to get a free trial of one of the paid plans, or
• upgrade to a paid plan for one month and then downgrade again if this is an option.

Before signing up, make sure you understand the terms and conditions, especially those relating to billing. Some products require that you sign up for a full year, even if you pay monthly.

Make a list of all the options you’ve found that you think will meet your organisation’s needs.

Step 3: Evaluating Options

The next step is to compare the criteria you recorded in Step 1, with the product or service options you recorded in Step 2 to work out which option, or options are most appropriate.

Start by evaluating the product or service against any non-negotiable criteria you’ve set. If the product or service does not meet these criteria, strike it off your list.

For the products or services that remain, determine how closely it meets each of the remaining criteria. You might need to test the product (such as a software subscription) or ask the supplier for more information.

If you have a lot of options to compare, it may be a good idea to set up a weighted attributes spreadsheet. Weighted attributes is an approach to evaluation where the importance of different criteria is reflected in the scoring.

The following example will take you through the steps of performing a weighted attributes evaluation.

Step 1: Identify and weight the attributes

First, identify the important attributes (criteria) for evaluating dishwashers and assign a weight to each based on its importance (out of 5, in this case):

• Cycle time: Weight = 5
• Capacity: Weight = 4
• Brand reputation: Weight = 4
• Local service support: Weight = 4
• Energy efficiency: Weight = 3
• Water efficiency: Weight = 3

Step 2: Rate each model

Next, rate each dishwasher model on a scale of 1 to 10 for each attribute:

Attribute	Weight	AquaClean XS	SparkWash 27	PureWash A3	EcoWash B9	QuickClean V6
Cycle time	5	7	8	6	7	9
Capacity	4	9	7	8	6	8
Brand reputation	4	9	8	7	9	7
Local service support	4	8	7	9	6	8
Energy efficiency	3	8	9	7	9	8
Water efficiency	3	7	8	9	6	8

Step 3: Calculate the weighted scores

Multiply the ratings by the weights for each attribute:

Attribute	Weight	AquaClean XS	SparkWash 27	PureWash A3	EcoWash B9	QuickClean V6
Cycle time	5	7x5=35	8x5=40	6x5=30	7x5=35	9x5=45
Capacity	4	9x4=36	7x4=28	8x4=32	6x4=24	8x4=32
Brand reputation	4	9x4=36	8x4=32	7x4=28	9x4=36	7x4=28
Local service support	4	8x4=32	7x4=28	9x4=36	6x4=24	8x4=32
Energy efficiency	3	8x3=24	9x3=27	7x3=21	9x3=27	8x3=24
Water efficiency	3	7x3=21	8x3=24	9x3=27	6x3=18	8x3=24
Total score		184	179	174	164	185

Step 4: Analyse the results

QuickClean V6 scores the highest with 185 points, making it the top choice based on this evaluation.

Identifying the Preferred Options

Hopefully, your evaluation has highlighted the most suitable product or service. If there isn’t a clear “winner” select the top two or three options to put forward as recommendations.

Getting Cost Information

Record the price of preferred product(s) or service(s) being careful to state the currency and whether or not the price includes tax (GST). As mentioned earlier, some organisations will require a certain number of formal quotes. If this is the case in your organisation, get in touch with the suppliers and ask for a quote.

Step 4: Writing Up Your Recommendations

If you’ve gone as far as doing a weighted attributes evaluation, chances are your team leader or manager is expecting you to write up your recommendations.

This is a chance for you to recommend the best product or service, explain the benefits it will provide, and show how you came to that recommendation.

If you were unable to pick one ‘winner,’ your recommendation may read “It is recommended that one of the following is selected; all will deliver the benefits that the organisation seeks” or something similar.

A written briefing is probably the best approach. We suggest you follow this format for product or service recommendations briefing:

1. Background
2. Recommendations
3. Benefits
4. Evaluation.

In This Topic We Have

• discussed the importance of knowing about the products and services that your business provides and looked at ways of building your knowledge of products and services
• explored considerations when offering advice about products and services
• looked at the products and services that businesses need to keep them running smoothly
• worked our way through the steps involved in recommending products or services for your office.

Well done, you’ve reached the end of this module. If you haven’t already, make sure you complete your assessments:

• Assessment 1: BATE302A1: Business documents
• Assessment 2: BATE302A2: Perform business administration processes