Customers’ Role in Co-Creating Value at Self-Service Technologies: From Role Theory Perspective

Abstract

Technological maturity brings both the organizations and customers into a digital era where organizations provide its service fully or partly through technological platforms, letting customers to perform by themselves without having direct interaction with the organization's employees. This transforms customers' role into more 'active' to be a collaborative value creator than be a passive recipient of the value produced by the organization. Organizations' role also converts from 'provider' of the value to the 'value facilitator', who offer value prepositions for customers' co-creation process.Though both the customers' and business organizations' roles have been changed in the current business context, the scholarly attention given to understand this transformation is very rare. In such a backdrop, this study aims at understanding customers' role in co-creating value at SSTs using the foundations of the Role Theory.Centered on the positivistic approach, this research carried out a quantitative survey distributing selfadministered questionnaires among 600 customers chosen based on non-probabilistic convenience sampling method. The study found significant positive impacts of 'role script', 'role performance' and 'role set', and insignificant effect of 'role congruence' on customer value co-creation in SSTs.The study theoretically contributes to enhancing the knowledge on customer value co-creation in selfservice technologies from role theory perspective, while practically helps business organizations to understand customers' role well and design SSTs which match with the customers' expectations.

Customers' Technology Know-How and Error-Correction Capability in using Self-Service Technologies

“…The roles of customers and enterprises are constantly changing due to technological advancements (Ugwuanyi et al, 2021), and currently, there is an emphasis on producing more value, which is a precondition for becoming competitive (Saarijärvi et al, 2013). Customers do service-related activities that would otherwise be performed by the firm's staff (Galdolage, 2021b), resulting in cost savings for service providers (Ding et al, 2007). Aside from that, SSTs offer advantages such as increased efficiency, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, service standardization and differentiation through technology (Meuter & Bitner, 1998), increased speed of service delivery, opportunities for customization and precision (Berry, 1999), cost reduction and productivity, etc.…”