Leveraging Customer-integration Experience: A Review of Influencing Factors and Implications

Abstract

Organizations have increasingly begun to co-create innovations, conduct idea competitions, or conduct crowdsourcing initiatives with customers in online communities. Yet, many customer-integration methods fail to attract sufficient customer participation and engagement. We draw on previous research to identify customers’ experience as an important determinant of whether customer-integration initiatives succeed. However, research has rarely applied the notion of experience in the context of customer integration. We conduct a cross-disciplinary literature review to identify the factors that constitute a positive customer-integration experience and the implications of the customer-integration experience. Based on 141 papers from marketing, technology and innovation management, information systems, human-computer interaction, and psychology research, we derive a framework for customer-integration experience that integrates 22 conceptually different influencing factors, 15 implications, and their interrelatedness based on motivation-hygiene theory. The framework sheds light on the current state of research on customer-integration experience and identifies possibilities for future research