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 self-administered 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 self-service technologies from role theory perspective, while practically helps business organizations to understand customers’ role well and design SSTs which match with the customers’ expectations.