MODELLING AND MEASURING OF CONSUMERS' COCREATED VALUE IN E-SERVICES

Abstract

Armed with modern technologies, companies today offer consumers a plethora of choices as value propositions. However, despite rigorous efforts to attract consumers and achieve customer satisfaction, companies fail to achieve these objectives. While there could be many reasons behind such failures, a key reason is failure to understand what 'value' actually means to the customer. For a very long time, value creation, communication and delivery were supposed to be firm exercises. However, advent of and increased access to the internet led to availability of information, and networking & empowerment of consumers. The new empowered consumer didn't want to remain at the end of the supply chain, rather, the consumer sought participation in the value development process. Riding on connective technologies, customer collaboration with organisations (or co-creation of value for oneself and others) constantly increased. Wikipedia, Youtube, Threadless, e-choupal, and social media are a few examples of the customer co-creation phenomenon, evident in e-services. Advantages associated with co-creation led to its increased adoption by companies. Despite the wide acknowledgement of the importance of co-creation, many questions still need to be answered, such as: Who are the participants in the value co-creation process? What is the nature of co-created value? How and why participants, along with consumers, get satisfied with their participation in the co-creation process? What role does co-created value play in consumer satisfaction? This dissertation attempts to investigate consumer participation in the value co-creation process and evaluate the consumer's role in the service decision making process in context of e-services. For this purpose, the study capitalises on literature from various streams such as human resource management, innovation research, services marketing, psychology, and strategic management. Building on findings of these studies, we propose a research model of consumers' value co-creation process and examine it through empirical data. The research model comprises of active customer participation, perceived organisational support and perceived fellow customer support as predictor variables which are inevitable for consumer's value co-creation process and acts as an important antecedents for consumer's co-created value which finally influences the satisfaction of customer. Consumers' co-created value is proposed to act as a mediating variable between the various predictors outlined and consumer satisfaction. Consumers' co-created value (CCV) is supposed to be a multidimensional construct and a scale was constructed to measure it. A descriptive study has been undertaken and empirical analysis conducted towards quantitatively investigating consumers' value co-creation process in an online banking context. Data were collected through self-administered banking SST intercept survey from 320 customers using automated teller machines (ATM) at various locations in Delhi. Results held that consumers' co-created value (CCV) is a key mediating variable in the consumers' value co-creation process. It was found that CCV acted as a mediating variable among active customer participation & satisfaction, perceived organisational support & consumer satisfaction, and perceived fellow customers' support & satisfaction of consumers. It was also found that consumers' co-created value and all the predictor variables had significant direct effect on customer satisfaction. Thus, this study is one of the first attempts to understand the nature of consumers' co-created value and its affect on consumer satisfaction in service decision making process. The present research would motivate researchers to extend this piece of work by incorporating consumer communities study and investigating each dimension of consumers' co-created value individually. Each dimension of co-created value and its affect on a customer's behavioural intention can be an area worthy of future study. This study will be a major help to managers who want to engage consumers on their websites. Firms need to work on each dimension of co-created value to retain consumers. Thus, findings of the study would help both managers and researchers, and contribute to the service decision making as well as consumers co-creation process by enhancing the various dimensions of value created in the collaborative process, fostering the enviromnent which greatly the interaction and dialogue between the firm and customer, and allowing the access and exchange of resources among the various partner in the co-creation process.