A Digital Service is a service delivered by an equipment manufacturer or an asset-centric service provider in which the digital component plays a fundamental role — either in generating value for the customer, or in generating efficiency for the company that delivers it.
A Digital Service is what a company offers to its customers when it embraces a Digital Servitization journey.
Two families of Digital Services
We can divide digital services into two broad families.
Pure Digital Services
These are self-service solutions where digital is the only vehicle — the only touch point between the service and the customer.
The customer interacts directly with a digital solution (for example a web portal or a mobile app), without a person delivering the service. Here the digital component is the service itself.
Managed Digital Services
These are services delivered through people, where the digital component supports the work of those who provide the service.
In this case, digital does not replace the person. Instead, it makes the service better in two ways:
- Higher service levels — for example faster response times, a reduction in defects and downtime, or an increase in asset performance.
- Greater efficiency — for example shorter support and diagnostic times, fewer and shorter field visits, optimized spare-parts inventory, and a lower risk of costs driven by emergencies.
Why this distinction matters
These two families can actually work against each other. If your self-service solution teaches customers how to maintain the product on their own, you may then find it harder to sell your annual maintenance plans. What creates value on one side can erode revenue on the other.
This is why you need to keep the distinction in mind when you design your offering and your service portfolio — so you can maximize revenue opportunities instead of cannibalizing them. A common approach is to package base tiers around self-service (pure digital services), and reserve premium tiers, with higher guaranteed SLAs, for managed services.
A useful way to reason about this is to read the Digital Servitization map horizontally. Take a single value proposition — one row, for example Repair — and ask: how much do I help the customer through self-service ("my solution helps you fix it yourself") versus through managed services ("I come and fix it for you")? Deciding where to draw that line, row by row, is how you turn the two families into a coherent, profitable offering.
Reasoning this way also helps you understand how the digital component creates value in each service you offer — for the customer, for the provider, or for both.
Role of IoT and telemetry data
Digital services are fundamentally data-driven: the value they generate depends on the data they can draw on. In practice, this data comes from three main sources:
- Product master data — the descriptive, anagraphic information about each product (model, configuration, components, and so on).
- Service data — the history of what has happened to the product over time: installation, maintenance, and repair interventions.
- Telemetry data — the operational data generated by the product itself while it works, streamed from the field through IoT connectivity.
Of the three, telemetry data has the highest potential for value generation. Because it reflects what the product is actually doing in real time, it opens the door to services that would otherwise be impossible — condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, performance optimization, and more.
For this reason, when you want to emphasize this aspect, some digital services are called Connected Services — digital services whose value is powered by the data generated by a connected product.