Value Destruction in Multichannel Services: An Abstract

Research into the delivery of services through multiple channels has revealed the importance of channel integration, the design of the service experience (Patricio et al. 2008) and service/integration quality (Sousa and Voss 2006). At the same time, instances of misalignment between customer expectations and service failures have equally been noted (Banerjee 2014). Multichannel services are concerned with the creation of value (Payne and Frow 2004), where customers and firms integrate their resources (Pinho et al. 2014; Vargo and Lusch 2004). There is extensive research on value creation but considerably less on how value might be destroyed (Echeverri and Skalen 2011; Ple and Caceres 2010). In value co-creation, customers are producers (Ramaswamy and Ozcan 2018) who define their roles in accordance with other actors within a service system (Akaka et al. 2013; Brodie et al. 2006), such as a multichannel service system (MSS). If the elements of co-creation are not well understood by all the actors within the system, then value may be destroyed rather than created (Ple and Caceres 2010). Value destruction has been described as the misuse of resources by an actor within the system (Ple and Caceres 2010), which may be accidental or intentional but arises owing to an asymmetry embedded in the interactions (Edvardsson et al. 2011). The misalignments referred to above may be examples of such asymmetries. The purpose of this investigation is therefore to empirically explore how these misalignments or asymmetries might destroy value in MSS.