Who are you and what do you value? Investigating the role of personality traits and customer-perceived value in online customer engagement

Abstract

While the importance of customer engagement has been widely acknowledged a gap remains in terms of our understanding of how customers engage with products and services delivered online. Addressing this gap is important given the increasing proportion of time spent interacting with companies online and the key role of customer engagement in delivering an effective customer experience. This paper seeks to address this gap through developing a theoretical framework of online customer engagement anchored in twenty-eight semistructured interviews with members of social media brand communities. This study's contribution to the customer engagement literature is twofold. Firstly, the study will bring new insights regarding personality traits as an antecedent of online customer engagement (OCE) and, secondly, customer-perceived value emerges as a novel consequence of OCE.Understanding what personality traits drive customers to engage online and what value they perceive to receive in this digital age can help managers to better segment and evaluate their customers' online engagement. Online brand communities can be improved accordingly.

What determines customers’ engagement in the digital service process?

“…Thus, it was determined that elements such as customer satisfaction, the maximization of customers' benefits, social facilitation, timefulfillment, and monetary evaluation experiences were important for customer engagement, especially during the front-end phase of the digital service process (c.f. Marbach et al, 2016).…”

“…Especially for digital business, customer relationships are in a crossroads, as new technologies are more often used to empower and engage customers (Straker and Wrigley, 2016). According to Marbach et al (2016), customer engagement differs from customer involvement and participation because involvement and participation are not interactive, co-creative experiences.…”

“…Moreover, personality traits affect the likelihood and level of customer engagement (Van Doorn et al, 2010;Marbach et al 2016). Marbach et al (2016) studied CEB in online brand communities and found seven personality traits that were related to CEB: introversion/extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, need for activity, need for learning, and altruism. Thakur (2016) studied CEB in the context of mobile 6 devices for shopping and found that CEB arises from six different customer experiences: social facilitation, self-connection, intrinsic enjoyment, time-filling, utilitarian, and monetary evaluation experiences.…”

“…Customer engagement can increase customers' loyalty to and satisfaction with a brand or firm (Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014), which may result in the brand or firm gaining a competitive advantage (Kumar and Pansari, 2016) or increasing its revenue (Straker and Wrigley, 2016). However, while the importance of CEB has been widely acknowledged, few studies have focused on customer engagement in a digital context (Marbach et al, 2016). This paper addresses this research gap by determining the factors that affect CEB in different parts of the digital service process.…”

Building Competitive Advantage Through Customer Experience Management

“…Jonsson 2009; Chandler & Lusch 2015; McColl-Kennedy et al 2015b; Sørensen & Jensen 2015; Strandvik et al 2012;Woodruff 1997). With introduction of driver rating, Uber used the sharing of experiences as the form of co-creation of the value and supported customer engagement to increase customer perceived value and also collected data for ensuring better future experience in the area, where experience and value creation is partly out of its control, because of the nature of ride-sharing platform(Marbach et al 2016).ConclusionBased on the analysis of research papers, customer experience, and value creation share much in common.Both areas are closely linked through the placement of the customer to the center of company's interest and their close mutual influence (Antón et al 2018; Bolton et al 2018; Chandler a Lusch 2015; Dacko 2017; Jaakkola et al 2015; Lee et al 2015; Marbach et al 2016; Pandey & Mookerjee 2017; Russell-Bennett et al 2017; Vargo & Lusch 2016; Varshneya & Das 2017; Wang et al 2018; Zolkiewski et al 2017). This customer is intently analyzed to reveal his expectations and effective ways of their exceeding, therefore how to provide him greater added value compared to the standard provided by competitors.…”