Do businesses that offer services need to be more customer focused than businesses that offer products? Why?

I think businesses should be customer focused in there services, as much as a company is offering services that attracts customers needs, as much as it would have returns, success and progress.

Businesses that offer service need to be more customer focused in terms of providing service but businesses that offer products also need to be customer focused in terms of customer service before and after sales.

Yes businesses that offer services need to be more customer focused.

Both Services and Products based businesses need to have human interaction and customer relationship. However, service based businesses rely heavily on human interaction and the relationship is longer whereas product based business have limited interaction and shorter relation with the seller.

n terms of a business plan, product businesses tend to focus on building their brand reputation, improving their market position and making sales, while service businesses tend to place their main focus on increasing revenue, rather than market share. The actual sales process also varies between the two types of businesses. Product businesses typically have quick turnaround times, as the customer tends to make purchase decisions quickly. Service businesses often require negotiations and customer contracts, which can make the sales process last longer.

Yes, certainly

Businesses offering products mainly have to have a good Product Experience for their users. 

However, service is mainly about developing "EXCELLENT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE"

In my opinion in both situation we should focus on customer needs. Of course offering services we work closer with our customer and we have to mention much more aspects than in "products business". Our ptoduct in this case it is our customer care and the process is still in our organisation. The contacts with our organisation are more often and the customer care have to be much better prepared for customer support.

In my opinion, business that offer services should focused their business on customer attends, because the products can be adapted on desire and customer's expectation by having a new partner (supplier or manufacturer) that will follow and allow to customers or end user them expectations.

Defnitely should be customer focused,before and after sales.

The challenge of service-business management begins with design. As with product companies, a service business can’t last long if the offering itself is fatally flawed. It must effectively meet the needs and desires of an attractive group of customers. In thinking about the design of a service, however, managers must undergo an important shift in perspective: Whereas product designers focus on the characteristics buyers will value, service designers do better to focus on the experiences customers want to have. For example, customers may attribute convenience or friendly interaction to your service brand. They may compare your offering favorably with competitors’ because of extended hours, closer proximity, greater scope, or lower prices. Your management team must be absolutely clear about which attributes of service the business will compete on.

Strategy is often defined as what a business chooses not to do. Similarly, service excellence can be defined as what a business chooses not to do well. If this sounds odd, it should. Rarely do we advise that the path to excellence is through inferior performance. But since service businesses usually don’t have the luxury of simply failing to deliver some aspects of their service—every physical store must have employees on-site, for example, even if they’re not particularly skilled or plentiful—most successful companies choose to deliver a subset of that package poorly. They don’t make this choice casually. Instead, my research has shown, they perform badly at some things in order to excel at others. This can be considered a hard-coded trade-off. Think about the company that can afford to stay open for longer hours because it charges more than the competition. This business is excelling on convenience and has relatively inferior performance on price. The price dimension fuels the service dimension.

In today's competitive marketplace, businesses must exceed the level of service that customers expect to build a network of loyal customers. Additional efforts to retain customers also yield financial dividends. According to research, it takes three to five times more money to replace a customer than to keep one.

businesses offering services need to be customer oriented as it makes long term relationship with customers. this enables for repeat business , reputation in the market for product & customer satisfaction