Service purchasing and value creation: Towards systemic purchases

The aim of this paper is to clarify the problematic issues of the procurement of service bundles and their value potential for business customers. Creating customer value is an essential aspect of service provision given the need to find new strategic options with value potential in supply chains and networks. In the paper we review the results of a recent survey on value creation in service bundles. We address two research questions concerning the characteristics of value creation in service purchasing, and the correlation between procurement strategies and the creation of value for customers. In order to find answers we carried out a survey among customers of the case company. From the responses we identified various customer segments. In order to explore the buying behavior of the different customer groups we conducted analyses of statistical variance between the clusters. According to the results, there was significant variation in almost all the selected variables. In the following we focus on the study design and the results, and discuss the findings.