Ranking the factors that impact customers online participation in value co-creation in service sector using analytic hierarchy process

Abstract

Ranking the factors that impact customer participation and engagement in value co-creation in service sector enables practitioners, especially service providers, to identify vital factors from those that are unimportant and that are essential for their service quality success and development. The objective of this study is to prioritize the factors that impact customer participation in value co-creation in the service sector. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is adopted by using Multi-Criteria Decision Making technique (MCDM) to determine the relative importance of the factors in influencing customer participation in the value co-creation through online platform. In order to rank the factors, this study is planned and performed in two stages. In the first stage some critical success factors that impact customer participation in value co-creation were identified through the literature review and preliminary case study. In the second stage, a pairwise comparison is designed based on AHP method to collect the opinions of experts and questionnaires were distributed among 10 organizational experts and academics as respondents. The pairwise comparisons obtained from this stage are analyzed by AHP using super decision software and excel spreadsheet. The research findings indicate that the success factors to engage customers in value co-creation activities have different priorities and weights. The weights obtained from AHP indicate that the organizational factors and individual factors got higher scores and ranked higher than the technological factors respectively. The most important results indicated that organizational aspects such as rewards and remunerations, open innovation culture and the organization leadership style are higher priority than any other factors, and in technology aspect it is verified that platform reliability and easy access got the fourth higher priority as well. Therefore, such results and weights obtained from this study will be used for prioritizing the factors that impact customer participation in value co-creation in the service sector and will be taken into consideration when value co-creation online platforms or systems are designed.