Customer Centricity and Customer Co-creation in Services: The Double-Edged Effects

Customer centricity considers customers’ inputs as the starting point for designing and implementing all marketing strategies in order to gain their satisfaction and loyalty. Engaging customers in service co-creation is a critical path to being customer-centric; it not only helps companies deliver services that meet customers’ needs but also increases customer engagement for sustainable competitive advantage. However, challenges and failures of companies’ co-creation efforts have been reported, suggesting that not all companies or customers are ready to embrace co-creation or handle the complexities of its processes. This chapter explores the path to building customer centricity through engaging customer participation in co-creation of services with an emphasis on recognizing its double-edged effects. It proposes a conceptual framework pertaining to the conceptualization and typologies of customer participation in services, its value co-creation process, boundary conditions, and downstream outcomes and concludes with directions for further research on building balanced centricity through customer co-creation.