Service dominant logic in practice : applying online customer communities and personas for the creation of service innovations

Many companies try to adopt a service-oriented perspective when developing new offerings by posing the question of how the creation of value jointly with customers can be improved. This requires a holistic view of customers beyond retrospective methods such as surveys. Observations of everyday life provide a valuable complement, because they initiate innovations not explicitly based on wishes formulated by customers, but on customer practices. Drawing on a case study of the Swiss Federal Railways (sfr), it is explored how ‘value-in-context’ and ‘co-creation’ can be put into practice. Online customer communities were used in the case study as they unveil value-in-context and practices of customers, which are important sources of innovation. The findings suggest that personas that were constructed based on the results from an online customer community consolidates user behaviour and contextual data and can help managers to improve their offerings in a service-oriented way.