Impact of customer co creation behaviors on crowd local delivery service quality master’s thesis, vietnam national university, hanoi

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOIVIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY VU LE HUY IMPACT OF CUSTOMER CO-CREATION BEHAVIORS ON CROWD LOCAL DELIVERY SERVICE QUALITY MAJOR: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION CODE

/ VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY

VU LE HUY

IMPACT OF CUSTOMER CREATION BEHAVIORS ON CROWD LOCAL DELIVERY

CO-SERVICE QUALITY

MASTER’S THESIS BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Hanoi, 2019

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

VIETNAM JAPAN UNIVERSITY

VU LE HUY

IMPACT OF CUSTOMER

CO-CREATION BEHAVIORS ON CROWD LOCAL DELIVERY SERVICE QUALITY

MAJOR: BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

CODE: 60340102

RESEARCH SUPERVISORS:

ASSOC PROF DR VU ANH DUNG PROF DR YOSHIKI MATSUI

Firstly, I would like to show my profound gratitude towards AssociateProfessor Vu Anh Dung and Professor Yoshi Matsui for your kind and carefulguidance over my master thesis In class, you are both wonderful teachers of thecourse of international business and operation management To Associate Professor

Vu Anh Dung, thank you very much for your suggestion of value co-creation, it is

an interesting and attractive research topic that I hardly know about it before.Without your recommendation, I obviously lost the chance to learn about this keyconcept of modern marketing To Professor Matsui, I enjoy my time in your seminarvery much Thank to your precious suggestion and interesting arguments that help

me to know more about survey-based empirical research that I almost know nothingabout it previously From bottom of my heart, I really want to apologize to you for

my not very good thesis that deserve your supports

Secondly, I would like to thank VJU and YNU professors, students and staffs

to help me to have unforgettable two years Especially my beloved MBA2, you guysare so interesting and fun I am happy to have chance to know you all

Finally, I would like to thank Ms Huyen (aka Huong or vice versa) You havedone a wonderful job that takes care all of our MBA2 students I wish you had bestsuccess and happiness with your family and your career

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES i

LIST OF FIGURES iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS iv

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Necessity of the thesis 1

1.2 Research objectives 1

1.3 Research questions 1

1.4 Research scope 2

1.5 Structure of the research 2

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 3

2.1 Overview of value co-creation 3

2.2 Dimensions of customer co-creation behavior 9

2.3 Crowd logistics and crowd local delivery service 18

2.4 Logistics service quality 22

2.5 Research gap 25

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH MODEL AND METHODOLOGY 27 3.1 Dimensions of customer value co-creation behavior in crowd local food

3.1.1 Service delivery process of crowd local food delivery 27

3.1.2 Analyzing dimensions of customer co-creation behavior 29

3.2 Conceptual model and hypotheses development 30

3.2.1 Responsible behavior and quality of crowd local food delivery service 31 3.2.2 Feedback and quality of crowd local food delivery service 31

3.2.3 Advocacy and quality of crowd local food delivery service 32

3.2.4 Tolerance and quality of crowd local food delivery service 32

3.3 Measure items development 32

3.4 Research method 35

CHAPTER 4 DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 36

4.1 Data collection and demographic results 36

4.2 Reliability test 38

4.2.1 Reliability analysis of Responsible behavior 38

4.2.2 Reliability analysis of Feedback 39

4.2.3 Reliability analysis of Tolerance 40

4.2.4 Reliability analysis of Advocacy 41

4.2.5 Reliability analysis of Quality 42

4.3 Factor analysis 43

4.4 Correlation test 45

4.5 Regression 46

4.6 Findings and implications 47

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION 49

5.1 Contributions 49

5.1.1 Academic contribution 49

5.1.2 Practical contribution 49

5.2 Limitations 49

5.3 Future research 50

REFERENCES 51

APPENDIXES 58

Appendix 1 Survey form in both Vietnamese and English 58

Appendix 2 Question items on customer co-creation behavior (Yi & Gong, 2013) 62 Appendix 3 Question items on service quality (Stank et al., 2003) 63

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Comparison between business logistics and crowd logistics (Carbone et

al., 2017) 20

Table 2.2 Characteristics of local delivery service (Carbone et al., 2017) 22

Table 2.3 Dimensions of SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988) 24

Table 3.1 Questions of co-creation behavior 33

Table 3.2 Questions of local delivery service quality 34

Table 4.1 Gender of respondents (Processed by SPSS 24) 36

Table 4.2 Age distribution of respondents (Processed by SPSS 24) 37

Table 4.3 Education level of respondents (Processed by SPSS 24) 37

Table 4.4 Living location of respondents (Processed by SPSS 24) 37

Table 4.5 Most frequently used service (Processed by SPSS 24) 38

Table 4.6 Testing reliability of Responsible behavior (Processed by SPSS 24) 38

Table 4.7 Testing reliability of Feedback (Processed by SPSS 24) 39

Table 4.8 Re-testing reliability of Feedback 1 (Processed by SPSS 24) 39

Table 4.9 Re-testing reliability of Feedback 2 (Processed by SPSS 24) 40

Table 4.10 Testing reliability of Tolerance (Processed by SPSS 24) 40

Table 4.11 Re-testing reliability of Tolerance (Processed by SPSS 24) 41

Table 4.12 Testing reliability of Advocacy (Processed by SPSS 24) 41

Table 4.13 Re-testing reliability of Advocacy (Processed by SPSS 24) 42

Table 4.14 Testing reliability of Quality (Processed by SPSS 24) 42

Table 4.15 Re-testing reliability of Quality (Processed by SPSS 24) 43

Table 4.16 KMO and Bartlett's test (Processed by SPSS 24) 43

Table 4.17 EFA rotated component matrix (Processed by SPSS 24) 44

Table 4.18 Correlations (Processed by SPSS 24) 46

Table 4.19 Regression model summary (Processed by SPSS 24) 46

Table 4.20 Regression coefficients (Processed by SPSS 24) 47

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Spheres of value co-creation (Grönroos & Voima, 2013) 8

Figure 2.2 Constituent parts of value co-creation (Saarijärvi et al., 2013) 9

Figure 2.3 Third-order factor model with CFA results (Yi & Gong, 2013) 11

Figure 2.4 Antecedents and dimensions of value co-creation (Neghina et al., 2015)

Figure 2.7 Conceptual model of e-LSQ (Rao et al., 2011) 25

Figure 3.1 Crowd local food delivery process 28

Figure 3.2 Conceptual model 31

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

e-LSQ Electronic logistics service quality

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Necessity of the thesis

Value co-creation is a key concept in modern marketing theory (Saarijärvi,Kannan, & Kuusela, 2013) It has been approached from different perspectives andlevels However, most of studies focus on the macro or meso level and leave themicro-level many unanswered questions Recently, crowd initiatives have risen inmany business industries, especially logistics and believe to provide new means oflogistics value co-creation (Carbone, Rouquet, & Roussat, 2017) The major type ofcrowd logistics – crowd local delivery gets more attentions from businessinternationally but very few from academic research It also fosters new need ofmeasuring new service quality in its model All of these issues bring up an idea ofinvestigate relation between customer co-creation behavior within crowd localdelivery service and their perception of value

Service quality is always a vital concern for service business, especially thenew type as crowd local delivery Since it relies much more on co-creation amonginvolved actors in its nature of service model, it is important to understand potentialrelationship between service quality of crowd local delivery and customer co-creation behavior Based on insights from this potential relationship, effectiveimplications that could improve service quality from customer co-creation could besuggested for practical businesses

1.2 Research objectives

This research aims at measure the relationship between level of customervalue co-creation behavior and service quality of crowd local delivery

1.3 Research questions

“Which dimensions of customer co-creation behavior have impact on factors

of crowd local delivery service?”

1.4 Research scope

Because of limitations in terms of survey scale, only type of food delivery is researched

1.5 Structure of the research

This thesis consists of 5 chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction – revealing basic ideas of the research in terms of background, objectives, subject and scope of the research Chapter 2: Literature review – building comprehensive understanding

over very complicated concept of value co-creation as well as background

to promote refined logistics service quality measurement for the new crowd business initiatives in logistics industry

Chapter 3: Research model and methodology – describing the

conceptual model and how the research is designed and carried out

Chapter 4: Data analysis and findings – discussion of research results Chapter 5: Conclusion – summarizing the contributions, limitations

and intentions for future research

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Overview of value co-creation

Research stream of value co-creation rooted in the observation of changing rolesbetween customers and firms Customers have been long considered as passive actor invalue creation Traditionally, under the assumptions and models of industrial economy(R F Lusch & Vargo, 2014a, 2014b); Porter (2008); (Stephen L Vargo & Lusch, 2008;Stephen L Vargo & Lusch, 2011) value is only created for customers and its creation isdriven by value-adding activities (Normann & Ramirez, 1993) Both of technologicaladvances and changes of management towards unconventional and innovative ways ofintegrating resources for the creation of value lead to new forms and shapes ofinteraction that replace this traditional dyadic relationships Value creation should not

be limited in the manufacturing process, but extends over consumption contexts undercustomers’ own control (Grönroos, 2008a; R F Lusch

& Vargo, 2014b) The focus is shifting from value creation to co-creation in order torealize the new role of customers It is crucial for firms to comprehend the logic ofbusiness ecosystems facilitating value co-creation, in order to gain and maintaincompetitiveness As a result, value co-creation is one the most important concept withinservice marketing and business management (Saarijärvi et al., 2013)

Currently, there are multiple ways to approach value co-creation Eachapproaches target value co-creation from different perspectives, scopes and level ofabstraction, thus they provides a complex of definitions, dimensions andinteractions among actors (Galvagno & Dalli, 2014) It is both of practical examplessuch as Dell, Lego… and academic arguments that contribute to the fragmentationsand diversification (Di Gangi & Wasko, 2009; Hienerth, Keinz, & Lettl, 2011) Themajor approaches to value co-creation are discussed in the following parts

Many-to-many marketing

Instead of dyadic relation between firms and customers, this approach promotesthe role of customer networks and the importance of other factors from broader view,such as employees, marketing intermediaries, and society during the co-creationprocess of value (Gummesson, 2007) Edvardsson, Tronvoll, and Gruber (2011) havepresented a social constructionist approach that only considers value co-creation in thesocial context and uses the holistic concept of value as “value-in-social-context”.

New product and service development

Customers tend to be more active and willing to involve in the firms’ newproduct/service development process The involvement of customers in thedevelopment process helps firms to discover the hidden needs of customers as well

as take advantage of their creative potentials Nambisan and Nambisan (2008) havesuggested that customer could have multiple roles in the development process,consist of product conceptualizer, designer, tester, support specialist and marketer.This involvement of customer rises partly upon the facilitation of technologicaladvances, especially the Internet (S Ohern & Rindfleisch, 2010)

Postmodern marketing

Similar to new product and service development literature, the postmodernmarketing also acknowledges the more active customers “who takes elements of marketofferings and crafts a customized consumption experience out of these” (Fuat Firat,Dholakia, & Venkatesh, 1995) Customers require a more active role in production and

in order to meet this demand and enable active participation of customers, marketershave to make their business processes more open (Bendapudi & Leone, 2003; Firat &Venkatesh, 1995) This phenomenon is often referred as “prosumption” that involvesboth production and consumption (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) According to Bendapudiand Leone (2003), customers have attained a new role that traditionally attaches to theproducers Thus, customers’ consumption is gradually viewed as a production processand requires “development of special skills” (Fuat Firat et al., 1995) This view shares

customer’s value creation also embraces not just the good or the service butadditional resources (e.g information and knowledge) (Grönroos, 2008b; R F.Lusch & Vargo, 2014a) According to Fuat Firat et al (1995), the product does notconsider as a “finished” object but a process that “customer could immerse oneselfand contribute inputs”.

The Service-Dominant logic

In the past decade, the stream of research on SDL has caught a lot of attentions ofresearchers for both the academic purposes and practical implications (Tommasetti,Troisi, & Vesci, 2017) Research on SDL (R F Lusch & Vargo, 2014a, 2014b; Stephen

L Vargo & Lusch, 2008; Stephen L Vargo & Lusch, 2011) has intensified discussionabout value co-creation because value co-creation is a key concept in SDL (Stephen LVargo & Lusch, 2008) Despite that SDL is dominant theory in marketing and value co-creation, it is still a pre-theoretical paradigm (Cantone, Testa, & Marrone, 2019).Stephen L Vargo and Lusch (2016) recognized the limitation of the currentfoundational premises/axioms of SDL that lacks explicit articulated specification of theco-creation mechanism Therefore, SDL to date could be regarded as a logic or mindsetthat includes many fragmentations of marketing (Gummesson, 2008) According toSDL, the logic of goods-centric thinking that marketing has inherited is less germane inthe current service era This way of thinking has influenced how value and valuecreation are perceived In the new era with increasing relevance of service, servicerather than goods, should be the fundamental unit of exchange, and goods only function

as transmitters of services and means for customers to get benefits from firmcompetences (R F Lusch & Vargo, 2014a; Stephen L Vargo & Lusch, 2008).Actualization of value of goods only happens if customers continue the value creationprocess “For these services to be delivered, the consumer still must learn to use,maintain, repair, and adapt the appliance to his or her unique needs, usage situations andbehaviors” (R F Lusch & Vargo, 2014a) Consumers are considers as source of operantresources that play essential role within resources integration during value creation.Because operant resources are different

and heterogeneous in each individuals, the capability of consumer skills andknowledge influences how value is created (Saarijärvi et al., 2013) Thus value is ajoint function of actions of consumers and producers (Ramaswamy & Prahalad,2004), and is certainly always co-created (Stephen L Vargo & Lusch, 2008).

According to Stephen L Vargo and Lusch (2008), value co-creation consists oftwo components The first is the co-creation of value In SDL, at the intersection ofthe offer and the consumer, value is created and determined by the consumer in theconsumption process The second component of value co-creation is co-productionthat refers to the involvement in the creation of the core offering itself Co-production can occur via shared ideas, co-design, or even shared production, withany partners in the value network

Service science

Service science largely overlaps with SDL and originates from an IBM-leddiscipline (Saarijärvi et al., 2013) Maglio and Spohrer (2008) have suggested thatservice science theoretically roots in SDL Its approach considers that value co-creationoccurs via the integration of existing resources and the available ones from variousservice systems, rather than just firm competences and consumers’ operant resources inSDL The purpose of the mentioned resource integration in service science is to

“contribute to system well-being as determined by the systems’ environment context”(R F Lusch, Vargo, & Wessels, 2008) According to service science, a service system

is value co-creation layouts that consist of people, technology and value propositions(Saarijärvi et al., 2013) In each service system, both a service provider and a customerinteract each other to co-create value, and every service systems depends on otherentities (Jim, Laura, Norm, & Tryg, 2008) Therefore, service science approaches tovalue co-creation in a broader perspective in comparison with SDL The resourcesintegration and configuration within a service system and between different servicesystems is certainly very large and technology often plays an important role as a critical

Service logic

Deviating from SDL, researchers in service logic approach introduce clearseparation of customer service logic and provider service logic (Grönroos & Ravald,2011) Regarding to the former service logic, customers combine the resources thatare provided by the firm with other resources they could access in daily activitiesand in the value creation processes In this approach, value is eventually created bythe customers and they also carry out the value creation processes Hence, value isnot always co-created and basically it could be the result of customer’s own act(Grönroos, 2008b; Heinonen et al., 2010) Only in case that the firm wants tobecome the co-creator of value with customer, it has to apply provider service logicand creates the interactions with the customer These interactions help firm be able

to influence the value actualization process of the customer and could assure that theactualized value-in-use equates to the value proposition (Grönroos, 2008b) The firmneeds to develop effective way to interact with the customer, in order to become avalue co-creator with its customers Grönroos and Voima (2013) have introduced aconcept of value spheres that further distinguish domains of provider, customer andthe joint area The value of provider sphere is just potential Through theactualization process, the value of customer sphere is the real value and it isindependent in case of customer’s sole creation process Value is only co-creation inthe joint sphere as the result of interactions between provider and customer

Provider Joint sphere Customer

(real value)

Figure 2.1 Spheres of value co-creation (Grönroos & Voima, 2013)

All the above approaches from many-to-many marketing, new product

development, postmodern marketing, SDL, service science and service logic to

value co-creation proves the nuanced multifaceted nature of the concept (Saarijärvi

et al., 2013) A variety of value co-creation approaches enriches knowledge about

the concept and clearly expresses its importance and attractiveness in academic

research as well as potential practical implications However, it is challenging to

capture the concept of value co-creation with the given various approaches

Aligning with Grönroos and Ravald (2011) that emphasized the key importance of

actors’ role classification, Saarijärvi et al (2013) suggest a useful model to explore

different approaches to value co-creation The model dismantles value co-creation

into three fundamental parts that consist of “value”, “co-” and “creation”

Figure 2.2 Constituent parts of value co-creation

(Saarijärvi et al., 2013)

2.2 Dimensions of customer co-creation behavior

As the above discussion on different research approaches to value co-creationthat varies in terms of perspectives, level of abstraction and scope The concept ofvalue co-creation is studied from the either micro, meso or macro level of interactionlevel Among these different levels, to date, most of studies are on meso (R F.Lusch, 2011) or macro (R Lusch & E Webster, 2011; Maglio & Spohrer, 2008;Wieland, Polese, Vargo, & Lusch, 2014) perspectives Thus, there are few answersabout how interactions happen between customer and firm employee at the microlevel (Neghina, Caniëls, Bloemer, & van Birgelen, 2015) Understanding this basiclevel of interactions is essential for better knowing the concept of value co-creation

in larger contexts According to R F Lusch (2006) development of a detailedmacro-marketing perspective is based on insights of micro-level Further discussions

in this part are the most relevant studies of value co-creation at the basic level ofdirect interactions between customer and employee

Randall, Gravier, and Prybutok (2011) introduce a model of three variables tomeasure scale and analyze not directly value co-creation but only the relationalfeature of the concept Based on the adoption of mixed method and quantitative

analysis, the authors suggest connection, trust and commitment as dimensions ofvalue co-creation with question mark The study doubtfully departs from SDL andfeaturing customer relationship management approach (Tommasetti et al., 2017).Gustafsson, Kristensson, and Witell (2012) focus on the role ofcommunication in fostering co-creation and innovation The study identifies fourcategories of communication, including frequency, direction, modality and content.Communication however, is just a section in the interactions between firm andcustomer Therefore, main limitation of the study is its specific narrow scope of co-creation Moreover, the study approach is somewhat on the single corporate point ofview.

Third-order factor model of customer co-creation behavior

Yi and Gong (2013) introduce a third-order model that consists two majordimensions: customer participation behaviors and customer citizenship behaviors It

is popular among the empirical studies on customer co-creation (Ahn, Lee, Back, &Schmitt, 2019; Hau, Tram Anh, & Thuy, 2017; Hussainy, 2017) in various serviceindustries While authors define customer participation behavior as a role behaviorthat is required for value co-creation process, customer citizenship behavior isvoluntary and additional The citizenship behavior could help to bring extraordinaryvalue to the firm but it does not consider as requirements for value co-creation likethe participation behavior In short, customer participation behavior is in-role andcustomer citizenship behavior is extra-role behavior Separate scales are adopted tomeasure each type of behavior based on the empirical evidence that in-role andextra-role behaviors have different patterns and antecedents as well as consequences(M Groth, 2005; Yi, Nataraajan, & Gong, 2011) In this model, each constructconsists of four different lower-order dimensions

Figure 2.3 Third-order factor model with CFA results

(Yi & Gong, 2013)

Dimensions of customer participation behavior

Information seeking: customers put effort into clarifying the requirements

of service and satisfaction of other cognitive needs Provision of this these information helps to reduce the customers’ uncertainty about service

interaction and value co-creation with employees Hence, customers could understand and manage the co-creation environment as well as their role of value co-creator

Information sharing: from the side of customers, some resources are very important to achieve successful value co-creation with firm, such as

information Without essential information, firm’s employees could not perform their duties as they are capable of By sharing this information withemployees, customers themselves could make sure that the delivered

service meets their specific needs

Responsible behavior: Customers also have certain duties andresponsibilities to comply with in order to have successful service delivery.Customers recognize their responsibilities to be cooperative, follow the

service rules, policies, and directions from employees In case of lack of cooperative behavior from customers, little value could be created.

Personal interaction: this dimension represents interpersonal relations between customers and employees Different aspects of these type of

human interactions could be take into account such as courtesy,

friendliness, respect… In the social setting of value co-creation

environment, people tend to be more likely to engage in co-creation if they feel more pleasant, congenial and positive

Dimensions of customer citizenship behavior

Feedback: It is essential for firm and employees to improve the service creation process in the long-term Firm could be greatly beneficial as

receiving suggestions from customers for better service Even though, feedback is not requisite for successful service result

Advocacy: the behavior of customers that recommend firm or employees to other people Obviously, advocacy is effective word-of-mouth

advertisement and could contribute significantly to establish firm’s positive fame Although this kind of behavior could represent the evidence of

loyalty, it is voluntary and not required to perform the service delivery.Helping: Customers could help each other to realize their value creation environment and roles of value co-creator It could be considered as a sense

of social responsibility among customers to help each other under similar difficulties

Tolerance: to some extent, customers could tolerate a certain failure of service to meet their expectation Mistakes and risks could always happen and be inevitable This kind of empathy toward firm could come from the belief of long-term fruitfulness from customers’ perspective

Model of joint activities

Based on the previous studies (Gustafsson et al., 2012; Karpen, Bove, &Lukas, 2012; Randall et al., 2011; Yi & Gong, 2013), Neghina et al (2015)introduce a model of customer value co-creation behaviors with six dimensions ofjoint activities and three antecedents This study is in line with the approach ofservice logic rather than SDL (Tommasetti et al., 2017).

Figure 2.4 Antecedents and dimensions of value co-creation

(Neghina et al., 2015)

From the Grönroos (2012)’s conceptualization of value co-creation, two keyaspects of value co-creation are: the purpose is to create value with service as thebasic unit of exchange; co-creation is a joint collaborative activity According to thebehavioral sciences, a joint activity is defined as a social interaction that twoindividuals use to coordinate their actions in order to make a change in theenvironment (Knoblich, Butterfill, & Sebanz, 2011) In services, the joint activities

between customer and employee as they interact each other may include severaldiscrete joint actions Based on the single purpose of each joint actions, it is possible todistinguish these actions Each joint actions lead to different value creation.

Based on the work of Karpen et al (2012), Neghina et al (2015) form sixdimensions of value co-creation from six types of joint actions:

Individualizing joint actions: are collaborative actions between customers and employees for mutual understandings of each other’s roles, resources, integration process and desired outcomes From customers’ perspective, these actions could consist of personal preferences explanation, description

of the personal hierarchy of needs or informing the preferred means of interactions…

Relating joint actions: are part of the value co-creating activity that provide necessary condition for occurrence of interactions, since any interaction always involves a relational element In a service interaction, this dimensioncould be referred as actions that aimed at building or enhancing a social andemotional relationship between customers and employees Such actions as exploring similarities between interaction participants, sharing mutual interests… are examples of this dimension

Empowering joint actions: refer as collaborative actions that negotiate the power to influence the outcome of the interaction between customers and employees Because of empowered role, actors in value co-creating processes could resume their responsibility for the outcome and could take action to intervene in case that they believe that it is necessary for the overall goal.Ethical joint actions: are collaborative actions that aims at creating fair andmoral guidelines among participants of interactions In order to achievesuccessful interactions, the involved actors have to work toward a sharedgoal without conflicts Ethical behavior is very important to minimize risks

According to Randall et al (2011), value co-creation requires a certain level

of transparency, integrity and risk sharing

Developmental joint actions: are joint actions that focus on improvement of customers’ and employees’ operant and operand resources As mentioned above different approaches to value co-creation, the focus is mostly on operant resources From the customers’ perspective, these actions could be referred as learning actions toward how to better use the service and

enhance customers’ resource base

Concerted joint actions: are joint actions that help to synchronize customersand employees’ interactions in terms of relevance or timing Such actions as

to adapt participants’ behaviors to other involved actors, to coordinate movement or to establish agreements could be included in this dimension Aspects of interaction like pace of conversation, distance between the participants and timing and relevance of information exchange could

influence over synchronization

Antecedences of value co-creation are adopted from the studies of (Gustafsson

et al., 2012; Randall et al., 2011); Yi and Gong (2013) and introduced as

“communicating”, “relating” and “knowing”:

Communicating: as earlier discussion of Gustafsson et al (2012) study, three out of the four aspects of communication, including frequency, direction, and content, are adopted as antecedences of value co-creation Indeed, among six joint actions in this model of co-creation behavior, communication is obvious acrucial factor to establish interaction among participants

Relating: is to have or establish social bonds in value co-creation.Relationships create structure to generate knowledge and integrate operantresources among participants Moreover, it also has positive impacts onamount of communication participants and enables to share the eachparticipants’ required tasks to pursue their final goals Three factors fromRandall et al (2011) study, including connection, trust and commitment are

adopted as antecedences of value co-creation, rather than possible

dimensions of value co-creation in the original idea

Knowing: only factors of information seeking, information sharing and

feedback from the model of Yi and Gong (2013) are selected as antecedences

of value co-creation, even though they come from different high-order

dimensions in the original model Knowing is referred as having or reflecting knowledge and is discussed as important to value co-creation, because

participants need common knowledge bases to start their collaboration

Model of nine dimensions of value co-creation behavior based on SDL

Figure 2.5 Dimensions of co-creation activities in three phases of service provision

(Tommasetti et al., 2017)

Acknowledging significant contributions of Neghina et al (2015) study onvalue co-creation at micro-interaction level, however Tommasetti et al (2017) arguethat it is not in line with SDL but service science approach Based on the study ofMcColl-Kennedy, Vargo, Dagger, Sweeney, and Kasteren (2012) in health careindustry, the authors introduce their model that consist of nine dimensions ofcustomer co-creation behavior and suggestion to measure these dimensions with thepurpose of keeping alignment with SDL These dimensions are divided into threeprovision phases: pre-delivery, co-delivery and post-delivery of service

Cerebral activities: comprise of mental attitudes of consumers towardpossible involvement in value co-creation during service delivery Thisdimension consists of four sub-dimensions: 1) customers’ positive attitude

tolerance towards possible lacks in services; and 4) trust in employees’skills All of these belong to emotional sphere (McColl-Kennedy et al.,2012) and influence over customers’ initial approach to the service Thusthey have impact on customers’ propensity to co-create as well as theoutcome of co-creation activities.

Cooperation: represents the activities that customers act in accordance to their required tasks and responsibility during service delivery The authors suggest two sub-dimensions that reflect different level of cooperation with service guideline: 1) compliance with basics; and 2) responsible behavior.Information research and collation: refers to informative actions that

customers implement in order to make use of service This dimension is divided into type of activities: 1) searching for information related to

service; and 2) collecting and organizing information

Combination of complementary activities: are customers’ further activities related to service in order to increase their engagement and chances of interactions This dimension could be translated as voluntary activities that customers could implement to support successful service delivery

Changes in habits: refer to customers’ willingness to modify their habits tofacilitate the service delivery It also reflects the impact of service oncustomers’ way of life or their bases of resources and integrating processes.Tommasetti et al (2017) divide this dimension into two activities that differ

in terms of level of habit adjustment: 1) pragmatic adapting; and 2) changemanagement The later implies long-term adaption for sustainablerelationship between customers and firm

Co-production: based on suggestions directly from SDL (R F Lusch & Vargo, 2014a; Stephen L Vargo & Lusch, 2008) that separates concept of co-production from co-creation Co-production refers to customer

involvement in realization of value proposition Hence, this dimension includes two sub-dimensions: 1) co-design; and 2) co-delivery

Co-learning: refers to customers’ activities that transfer information and resources from both previous experiences and external sources It has two sub-dimensions: 1) information sharing; and 2) feedback that generally differs in terms of transfer direction whether towards other customers or to firm and employees.

Connection: This dimension comprises of activities that customers

implement in order to establish or maintain relationship with firm and employees It reflects effectiveness of relation between participants in the co-creation processes

Overlaps among different models of co-creation behavior

Because of diversification in terms of theoretical approach to value creation, the above model of co-creation behavior at micro-interaction level alsocome with various labelled dimensions However, there are few differences amongmodels in terms of co-creation activities These activities are actual assigned todifferent labels from a model to others For examples, responsible behavior in study

co-of Yi and Gong (2013) appears in Neghina et al (2015) study as ethical jointactions, and it eventually exists as a sub-dimension of cooperation in the model ofTommasetti et al (2017) This kind of issue happens with other labeled dimensions

in these models Among them, only model of Yi and Gong (2013) is empirical one.Both Tommasetti et al (2017) and Neghina et al (2015) are just conceptual papers.Therefore, opting for adoption of the third-order factor model (Yi & Gong, 2013) isobvious for this research

2.3 Crowd logistics and crowd local delivery service

The rise of crowd practices roots from the idea that each individuals couldintegrate their personal resources to perform traditional business activities viainformation technology (IT) platforms (usually websites and/or mobile applications)(Carbone et al., 2017) The word “crowdsourcer” was originally conceptualized as

continuous evolution of the concept, it increasingly overlaps with sharing economy.Crowdsourcing is very similar to “peer-to-peer for-profit” model among fourcategories of sharing economy (Juliet, 2014) While crowd logistics has caught a lot

of attentions in the business world (Carbone et al., 2017), there are very fewresearch papers on this topic The first definition of crowd logistics is from the work

of Mehmann, Frehe, and Teuteberg (2015) These researchers define crowd logistics

as “the outsourcing of logistics services to a mass of actors, whereby thecoordination is supported by a technical infrastructure” Later study of Carbone et

al (2017) aims at investigating different crowd logistics initiatives andcharacteristics by adopting online case study method over 57 initiatives In thisstudy, crowd logistics is conceptualized as “being done through collaborativeplatforms and mobile apps that connect individuals and firms to peers in order tomake the best use of distributed, idle logistics resources and capabilities.”Individuals perform logistics service tasks on an ad-hoc basis of crowd logistics

In each crowd logistics initiatives, based on the support of IT platform (eitherwebsites or mobile applications) the relationship between individuals in the crowd isbuilt up and they could perform logistics tasks What crowd logistics initiativesoffers individuals to connect to the platforms maybe in economic or noneconomicforms (Carbone et al., 2017) The core idea of crowd logistics initiatives is to matchlogistics assets and capabilities with needs of logistics Eventually, they helps toincrease utilization of assets

The IT platform work as a market mediation between logistics capability andlogistics demand Based on effective algorithms, IT platform help to balance thedistribution of work flow to among individuals at the supply sides For the demandside, it provides the most suitable individual service provider for each case With thefeatures of comments and rating, customers could be actively contribute to valuecreation and protect their benefits Between supply and demand simultaneously, itadopt flexible mechanism such as dynamic pricing that maintain profitable balance

Table 2.1 Comparison between business logistics and crowd logistics

(Carbone et al., 2017)

Carbone et al (2017) summarize differences between traditional businesslogistics and crowd logistics initiatives Apart from the mentioned characteristics ofcrowd logistics, major limitation is amateur logistics skills and lacks of professionalassets to special tasks Most of crowd logistics initiatives only could offer basiclogistics services such as transport or storage because individuals in the crowd whoperform logistics tasks do not have professional training or certified skills and justuse their own ordinary assets like personal bikes, automobiles Increasingrequirements of skills and assets also prevent expansions of the crowd, thus makethe platform less attractive Besides that, instead of set of standardized KPIs, thequalitative type of performance measurement is applied in crowd logistics

Considering crowd logistics as new form of logistics value co-creation,Carbone et al (2017) adopted method from Saarijärvi et al (2013) to analyze Theauthors dismantle the co-creation model of crowd logistics into three constituentparts including “value”, “co” and “creation” Value from crowd logistics service isinfluenced by the attractiveness of logistics advantages and perceived risk inopposite directions About resources for co-creation processes, crowd logistics rely

on the availability of idle physical resources and simplicity of logistics tasks Themechanism of value co-creation in crowd logistics depends on the support of IT

Figure 2.6 Dismantling value co-creation in crowd logistics

(Carbone et al., 2017)

As results of analyzing 57 crowd logistics initiatives, Carbone et al (2017)conclude four types of crowd logistics services They are crowd storage, crowdlocal delivery, crowd freight shipping and crowd freight forwarding Each type isembedded with different value propositions as well as particular resources andmechanisms Among them, researchers believe that local delivery service has themost potential impact Detailed characteristics of these crowd logistics initiativesare described in Table 2.2

Crowd local delivery service includes service for delivering parcels and foods.These two sub-criteria are different regarding to service process In crowd fooddelivery service, customer orders food from the restaurants on the mobile applicationsthen the crowd shipper will be assigned to go to the restaurants and bring the orderedfood to the customer In crowd parcel delivery service, customer asks crowd shipper toarrive in the picking-up location to take the parcel to the required destination Withinthis research, only the food delivery service is investigated Apart from the difference

of service delivery process, two kinds of crowd local delivery service share the samecharacteristics that are suggested in the study of Carbone et al (2017)

Table 2.2 Characteristics of local delivery service

(Carbone et al., 2017)

Crowd local delivery

Types of logistics connections Local short distance

Logistics risk for users Lack of trust in the crowd

Crowd physical resources Cars, vans bikes, public transport

Crowd logistics capabilities Pickup, driving, riding, delivering

Logistics operational support

GPS scheduling software

by the platform

Logistics transactional support

Pricing system, checking drivers’ licenses

by the platform

2.4 Logistics service quality

There are two main streams of researches towards logistics service quality: fromphysical distribution service and from marketing with service quality theory Theformer one is the traditional approach to logistics service Because of changes in thebusiness environment, operations-based definitions of logistics service that originallyroot from physical distribution service have been broadened New value-added conceptwidened logistics service; however, it was still operations-based Therefore,components of logistics service according to this approach all focus on the serviceprovider In order to measure perceived value from customers’ perspective, the servicequality literature from marketing is adopted It is inevitable because customers’perspective of service quality is determinants of service satisfaction

these researchers, PDS consist of three components: availability, timeliness andquality These are typical researches on logistics service from operations-based

22

concept The use of customer-based concepts of logistics service quality help totransform physical distribution research more compatible with marketing Bienstock,Mentzer, and Bird (1997) follow the similar methodology as SERVQUAL(Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1988) to develop scale to measure quality of PDSfrom customers’ perspective It is conceptualized as physical distribution servicequality (PDSQ) that consists of three first-order dimensions: timeliness, availability andcondition Further development from this kind of mixed approach, T Mentzer, Flint,and Hult (2001) introduce a model of nine dimensions of logistics service quality(LSQ) that incorporates three stages of service delivery and process-basedcharacteristics of logistics The nine dimensions are personnel contact quality; orderrelease quantities, information quality, ordering procedures, order accuracy, ordercondition, order quality, order discrepancy handling, and timeliness This model is laterrefined and tested by Rafiq and Jaafar (2007) with adding more measure items andadoption of 7-point Likert scale instead of 5 in the context of 3PL service in the UK.Thai (2013) continues to develop the model with the aspects of corporate responsibilityand sustainability, as well as image of the firm All of these studies are based on thebusiness-to-business context, such as 3PL service industry.

Another major trend of applying service literature from marketing is to adoptservice quality model that is developed for service setting in general, such asSERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988) It is very convenient for researcher since thegeneric scale for measuring service quality was built Application of SERVQUAL isalready popular in various service industries before expansion to logistics However,researchers also argue on limitations of this model Because of differences amongservice industries, scale from SERVQUAL need customized in advance to fit each one.Originally, SERVQUAL is created upon research of service quality in four cases: bank,credit card company, repair and maintenance company, and long-distance telephonecompany In all of these cases, service is a kind of close interaction between customersand employees and of course, logistics industry does not have these characteristics of

basis of quality In SERVQUAL, service quality is the gap between customers’expectation and the actual perception of service Cronin Jr and Taylor (1992)criticize it because customers might be very difficult to measure their expectations.

In order to overcome this supposed limitation, they introduce SERVPERF modelthat use traditional concept of quality as excellence of performance Hence, instead

of measuring both expectation and perception of service, only perception of service

is evaluated However, SERVPERF is only recognized as a transformation ofSERVQUAL because it applies the same scale and dimensions In reality, bothSERVQUAL and SERVPERF are the most popular service quality model inlogistics industry (Gulc, 2017)

Table 2.3 Dimensions of SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988)

Considering the unique characteristics of logistics service and the mentionedlimitations of SERVQUAL/SERVPERF application, Stank, Goldsby, and Vickery(1999) combine five dimensions of SERVQUAL into two: operational performanceand relational performance “Performance” implies that they follow the approach ofCronin Jr and Taylor (1992) towards concept of quality Operational performanceconsists of reliability (similar to the same name dimensions of SERVQUAL) and

“related to the consistent quality aspect of operational performance and price”.Relational performance contains responsiveness, assurance, and empathy dimensions ofSERVQUAL The leftover dimension of SERVQUAL, tangibles to some extent

could be considered as relational factor Stank, Goldsby, Vickery, and Savitskie(2003) adjust the model in 3PL industry They separate cost as the third dimensionsfrom operational performance Arguing that the model is mainly based on B2Bcontext, Rao, Goldsby, Griffis, and Iyengar (2011) suggest to remove relationaldimension as it is less relevant in case of e-LSQ with context of B2C.

Figure 2.7 Conceptual model of e-LSQ

2.5 Research gap

There are limited researches on value co-creation at the micro-interaction level,especially the empirical ones The dimensions of customer co-creation behavior are notclearly explained and overlapped across various researches Even the most recognized