The co-creation experience from the customer perspective: its measurement and determinants
Abstract
Purpose
Companies increasingly opt for co-creation by engaging customers in new product and service development processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the customer experience in co-creation situations and its determinants.
Design/methodology/approach
The conceptual framework addresses the customer experience in co-creation situations, and its individual and environmental determinants. To examine the degree to which these determinants affect the customer experience in co-creation situations, the author starts by proposing and testing a multidimensional co-creation experience scale (n=66). Next, the author employs an experiment to test the hypotheses (n=180).
Findings
Higher levels of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity positively affect different co-creation experience dimensions. The impact of these dimensions on the overall co-creation experience, however, differs according to customers’ expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Therefore, the author concludes that the expected co-creation benefits determine the importance of the level of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity for the co-creation experience.
Originality/value
This research generates a better understanding of the co-creation experience by providing insight into the co-creation experience dimensions and their relative importance for customers with different expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Additionally, this research addresses the implications of customer heterogeneity in terms of expected co-creation benefits for designing co-creation environments, thereby helping managers to generate more rewarding co-creation experiences for their customers.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Professor Dr Valarie Zeithaml for her help in developing this research idea and her advice in writing the paper. Furthermore, the author thanks Professor Dr Bart Larivière for his help with the data analysis. Finally, the author also thanks Professor Dr Jim Bettman, Professor Dr Chester Insko, Dr Arne De Keyser, and the members of her doctoral examination committee for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Sincere gratitude also goes to the two anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors whose comments and suggestions were very helpful to improve this paper.
Citation
Verleye, K. (2015), "The co-creation experience from the customer perspective: its measurement and determinants", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 321-342. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-09-2014-0254
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited