Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains customer play a critical role in value creation, most previous research has focused exclusively on employees rather than on customers. Therefore, more integrated attempts to understand customer value creation behaviour in the service marketing research area are clearly necessary. Few studies have systematically investigated customer value creation behaviour in terms of theoretical and empirical research. Theoretical research emphasizes that the firm should focus on what customers actually do in the value creation processes instead of what customer actually buy in the market. Value for the customer refers to the value offered for the customer, and it is the typical meaning of customer value in practice. The core concept of value is derived from an analysis of both customer satisfaction and cost. Without a rigorous analysis, it is almost impossible to fully understand the nature of customer value creation behaviour.