Full length articleCustomer participation, value co-creation and customer loyalty – A case of airline online check-in system
Introduction
Information communication technology has widely transformed the interactions between service providers and consumers. With advances in information communication technology, self-service technology is replacing staff in many counter operations, enabling customers to participate directly in the service process, without employees getting involved (Bitner et al., 2002, Meuter et al., 2000). This allows the service company to provide services anytime, and anywhere (Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002). For example, both information communication technologies and self-service technologies, such as self-check-in kiosks or online check-in systems, are widely used in the air transport industry. The self-service technologies in check-in services not only allow airlines to optimize space and bring down their operating costs, but also help passengers to save time and money through the better and faster interactions they enable between service providers and their customers. In addition to airline's willingness to adopt the self-service technologies, the success and benefits of such technologies rely crucially on customer participation.
Based on the service-dominant logic of marketing (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), the customer is always a co-creator of value. The service-dominant logic thus views customers as proactive co-creators rather than as passive receivers of value, and sees companies as facilitators of the value co-creation process, rather than as producers of standardized value (Chan et al., 2010, Payne et al., 2008). Customer participation is also consistent with the notion of “prosumption”, defined by Xie, Bagozzi, and Troye (2008) as value creation activities undertaken by the consumer that result in the production of products they eventually consume and that become their consumption experiences. Based upon both provider's and user's activity levels, Wünderlich, Wangenheim, and Bitner (2013) propose a smart service interactivity matrix with four types of smart services, such as interactive service, self-service, machine-to-machine service and provider active service. Here, self-service refers to those services with the characteristics of high user activity but low provider activity. Airline online check-in systems are one of the typical business-to-customer examples for the use of self-service technologies. Through customer participation, such systems can make it easy for passengers to check-in online anytime and anywhere, and not only reduce the costs and resources needed for the airline, but also provide better service to passengers. As such, the values shared by the airline and passengers can be co-created. Although the concepts of service-dominant logic and value proposition are increasingly in use, little empirical research in the business-to-customer context (Chan et al., 2010) has investigated how customer participation affects customer perceived values, and how the perceived values affect customer satisfaction and loyalty, the benefits that are sought by the firms that use such technologies.
Since value co-creation is a central tenet of the service-dominant logic and the main premise of customer participation (Chan et al., 2010, FitzPatrick et al., 2013), this study proposes a conceptual model to investigate how customer participation enables customers to co-create the intrinsic as well as extrinsic values of participation, which then affect their satisfaction and behavioral outcomes in an airline service context (see Fig. 1). Specifically, three types of values (i.e., enjoyment value, economic value and relational value) are specified to measure the passengers' co-created values through their participation in using an online check-in system.
Section snippets
Customer participation and co-created values
According to the service-dominant logic, customers are viewed as proactive value co-creators rather than passive receivers of value, and companies are thus urged to take up the role of facilitators of the value co-creation process (Payne et al., 2008). Customer participation reflects the related efforts in co-producing a service (Chan et al., 2010), and such participation enables companies to derive closer and more profitable relationships with their customers (Bendapudi & Leone, 2003; Payne
Sample and procedures
A self-administrated questionnaire survey was used to collect empirical data from air travelers who had used the online check-in system at two major airports in Taiwan, based on a convenience sampling method. The questions in the survey were designed based on a review of the literature and the specific characteristics of an online check-in system. Potential participants were first asked if they had ever used an airline online check-in system. If they responded “yes”, then after being briefly
Results
The means, standard deviations, internal consistencies (Cronbach's α coefficients) and zero-order correlations among the study variables are in Table 1. The α values for all the scales were greater than 0.70, indicating reasonable to good reliability (Hair et al., 2006).
Discussion and conclusion
This research provides empirical evidence in support of the importance of customer participation in value co-creation, which is seen as a prerequisite for the success of a firm's strategic efforts to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty with the use of SSTs. The key findings of this study are discussed in more detail, below.
First, our results indicate that when customers participate in using an airline online check-in system they can create both extrinsic (e.g. economic, relational) and
Limitations and future research
Customer participation is context-specific, and the current study only focuses on the self-service aspect of the smart service interactivity matrix proposed by Wünderlich et al., 2013), although the success of other types of smart services (e.g., interactive service, machine-to-machine and provider active services) also depend to a significant degree on the level of customer participation. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the issues raises in this work, additional studies could
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Science & Technology, R.O.C. (MOST 102-2410-H-006-089 and MOST 104-2410-H-006-075).
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