The co-creation experience from the customer perspective: an experiment in designing compelling environments

As service markets become more competitive and customers more demanding, organizations seek new ways to generate better customer experiences through innovation while controlling costs. One path to these ends involves customers in service delivery processes through self-service (e.g., ATMs) and co-production (e.g., patients giving doctors medical background information). Recently, more attention – both in theory and practice – centers on customers participating directly in service creation or development processes through co-creation (e.g., game companies offering programming tools to customers). Because a key assumption is that co-created products and services generate a better customer experience than standard or customized products and services, this research examines the co-creation process from the customer perspective. As background to the research, we articulated how co-creation differs from self-service and co-production. In co-creation (1) the customer is a source of competence and innovation instead of a source of productivity or service quality; (2) higher interdependency and shared responsibility exist between customers and the firm; and (3) the focus is on creating compelling experience environments in which customers and firms are likely to co-create new products and services. The central question, however, is how firms can create an environment that enables customers to act as a source of competence and innovation in collaboration with the firm, thereby improving the customer experience. Because the co-creation literature often associates compelling customer environments with well-designed tools and interactivity with other co-creation actors, this study empirically investigates the impact of different types of tools and interactivity with other co-creation actors on the customer experience. To investigate, a 2 (tool: technological tool versus non-technological tool) by 2 (interactivity with other co-creation actors: low versus high) between-subject experiment was developed. Due to a lack of a tested scale measuring customer experience in its full detail was not available (cf. Verhoef, Lemon, Parasuraman, Roggeveen, Tsiros & Schlesinger, 2009), we also developed – as part of the experiment – a new scale to capture the customer experience using previous literature and other items where needed. The customer experience scale we developed captures rational, pragmatic, cognitive, emotional, personal, and social customer experience aspects. As these customer experience aspects are likely to be weighted differently from customers with different motives, weighting scores on different customer experience aspects by customers’ motives is incorporated. This experimental research contributes to the co-creation literature by providing more insight into the conditions under which co-creation improves the customer experience. Moreover, a better understanding of the co-creation environment preferences of customers with different motives is generated. From a managerial point of view, this research project will help managers to better match the design of co-creation environments with customer motives, so that the customer experience is improved. Moreover, the new customer experience scale can be used as a managerial tool to create more compelling customer environments.