Management processes and management’s role in customer value creation

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to study management processes within successful societal entrepreneurship to further understand the role of management in customer value creation. Design/methodology/approach-Management in three successful societal entrepreneurship initiatives has been studied. Data have been collected through interviews, direct observation, participant observation and documentation. Management tasks, activities and behaviours have been identified and analysed from a system view. Findings-The result presents essential management processes important for societal customer value creation, their input, output and main focus. Some management processes are interrelated and are sometimes part of another management process. The management seems driven by "need", "opportunity", "interest" and "demand", when creating societal customer value. From a system perspective, management has an indirect role in societal customer value creation and is important for possibilities to create societal customer value. Both the initiative and the surroundings have been found to be of importance to the management's scope for contributing to societal customer value creation. Originality/value-The study provides the possibility to understand and learn from management, the management processes and their role in societal customer value creation. Thereby, it describes how to successfully provide customer value to society and work with societal, environmental and sustainability issues.

Barriers analysis for customer resource contribution in value co-creation for service industry using interpretive structural modeling

“…Merrilees et al (2017) investigated the role of employee engagement in facilitating an employee-led value co-creation in the not-for-profit context. Åslund, and Bäckström (2017) examined the role of management process in the “societal entrepreneurship” context and found out the role and focus of important processes. Breidbach and Maglio (2016) explored the role of economic actors in complex business-to-business (B2B) service systems, when resource exchange is contingent on available and accessible Information and Communication Technology (ICT).…”

Service workers and “difficult customers”: quality challenges at the front line

“…It follows that blaming only the customers for being "difficult" ignores the emphasis in the service literature on frontline workers' critical roles in creating quality service (Lee et al, 2017;Åslund and Bäckström, 2017). Accordingly, this paper contributes to the managerial literature and current theorizing about factors affecting service quality, by shedding a new light on how frontline workers' perceive, interpret and construct meaning, and react to customers whom they deem "problematic".…”

Servitization in the creative and cultural industries

“…Our conceptual approach considers servitization as the way to move toward value co-creation by innovating existing business models (Li, 2020; Landoni et al , 2020), in which customers’ value creation is integrated into management (Åslund and Bäckström, 2017). Focusing on the role of value co-creation in CCI introduces a digitalization-based servitization logic into studies of CCI (Chandna and Salimath, 2020; Li, 2020).…”