Interaction experiences and outcomes of value co-creation in banking in Saudi Arabia
Creators: name: Alhothali, Ghada Talat
Publisher: name: Monash University
Year: 2017
Subjects: Uncategorized

description: Services theory emphasises the importance of both customer involvement in relevant processes and for service outcomes to be perceived as high value. Co-creation of value is a joint process by firms and their customers, during which they use reciprocal interactions to draw on relevant resources. However, current understanding of the meaning of co-creation is limited, especially with respect to multichannel service delivery. Hence, this project has two major aims. First, it explores the meaning of, and develops a measure for, the co-creation experience from the perspective of both managers and customers. Second, the project uses customers’ responses to test relationships between antecedents of the co-creation experience, its dimensions, and outcome variables including customers’ perceived value-in-use, and customer commitment. To achieve its objectives, the project uses two sequential studies with data collected from five major banks in Saudi Arabia. In Study 1, the responses of 33 interviewees were content analysed to understand how the co-creation experience is interpreted. Three key dimensions were identified: joint problem-solving (JPS), joint relationship development (JRD), and joint knowledge and learning (JKL). In Study 2, responses from 528 banking customers were used to identify the psychometric properties of the co-creation experience measure, and to test hypothesised relationships between integration quality (antecedent), co-creation, the factors contributing to customers’ perceived value-in-use (customer participation benefits, convenience value, and religious value), and customers’ affective and continuance commitment to the bank. Testing the measurement and structural models revealed that the three-dimensional measure of the co-creation experience is robust, but that the factors have different effects with respect to outcomes. JPS is positively related to only customer participation benefits of value-in-use, while JRD and JKL are related to affective commitment, but not to value-in-use. Additionally, JKL is linked to continuance commitment. These findings extend contemporary theory focussing on service-dominant logic. Finally, the antecedent, integration quality retains the importance attributed to it in the literature in that it is related to each of the co-creation experience, convenience value and affective commitment. Several implications for banking managers emerge. JPS needs to be proactive taking into account all types of contact with customers regardless of their location, and supporting coordination among different banking channels. To build positive feelings towards the bank, employees predominantly need communication skills to improve on and maintain existing customer relationships; while the JKL findings suggest that banks must invest in a variety of strategies to facilitate on-going education of both employees and customers about collaboration and the effective use of multi-channels. This study has the limitations of cross-sectional research and as it was conducted on end consumers in Saudi Arabia, the findings might not be generalizable to developed or culturally different populations, or business customers. Other areas that warrant further investigation include the role and importance of religious value, which emerged as a dimension of value-in-use; the possible commitment or loyalty outcomes of JPS, which were not evident in the current study; and further research into JKL, which provided links to both affective and continuance commitment.