Customer-to-Customer (C2C) Connectedness in Services – Unlocking a New Source of Value Co-Creation

Contemporary service organizations create value through multiple inter-organizational relationships. The relationships between the service organization and its customer have been the dominating focus in literature on value co-creation in large service organizations. This paper introduces the novel phenomenon of value co-creation emerging around interpersonal and digital customer-to-customer (C2C) connections. With the advent of the Internet, social media, “digital native” customers, and the availability of big data and new analytical tools, service organizations are afforded to tap into existing social relationships among their customer base or even to ‘engineer' novel connections. We present a theory-led model to explain how firms can create new sources of service value through “C2C connected value co-creation”. By extending Teece's concept of complementary asset in the service context, this model subsumes two major building blocks: a firm's potential for C2C connections and complementary service assets, namely the network capital, mirroring service resources, and advancing services resources of the connected customer. We present three strategies for C2C connected service value co-creation describing combinations of these building blocks: (1) embedding, (2) substituting, and (3) expanding. Multiple case examples illustrate our propositions. Our novel form of theorizing has implications for future research on management of information systems in service organizations