The CSS Model

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Services are processes where customers take part in the process. A customer and a service provider interact with each other and as a result of these interactions service for the customers emerges. Both the service provider and the customer co-create value for the latter. The service provider’s role is to develop the right circumstances for value-supporting interactions to occur. This is done by initial back-office work and by creating the right resources and processes for the interactions with customers. Services are value-supporting processes from which customers capture value, whereas goods are value-supporting resources that customers have to integrate with other resources, for example, other goods and knowledge about how to use these goods, in order to capture value from them (Gronroos 2006, p. 324). Service processes also include goods, alongside other resources such as people, technologies, systems, and knowledge, but the service provider and the customer integrate such goods with the other types of resources used into a service process. Following a value-in-use logic the service provider can co-create value, whereas in the case of customers’ consumption of goods, the supplier has no way of interfering with the consumption process. Consequently, in the latter case customers are sole creators of value.