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Keywords Customer service management, Market orientation, Market research, Customer information, Learning, Sweden
Abstract New service development relies on the complex task of understanding and anticipating latent customer needs. To facilitate proactive learning about the customer, recent findings stress customer involvement in the development process and observations of customers in real action. This paper draws on theory from market and learning orientation in conjunction with a service-centered model, and reviews the literature on customer involvement in innovation. A field experiment was conducted in Sweden with end-user mobile phone services. The design departures from the nature of service that precepts value-in-use and by borrowing from relevant techniques within product innovation that supports learning in customer co-creation. The experiment reveals that the consumers' service ideas are found to be more innovative, in terms of originality and user value, than those of professional service developers.
Introduction
Market-oriented companies have mainly focused on satisfying expressed needs of the customer, typically by using verbal techniques such as focus groups and customer surveys, to gain understanding of the use of current products and services (Dahlsten, 2003; Slater, 2001). The problem is, however, that those techniques tend to result in minor improvements rather than innovative thinking and breakthrough products (Harari, 1994). This problem arises because customers have trouble imagining and giving feedback about something that they have not experienced (e.g. Leonard and Rayport, 1997; Ulwick, 2002; Veryzer, 1998; von Hippel, 1986). Organizations simply cannot access, understand, and meet latent needs of the customers by only using surveys and interviews. Latent needs can be referred to as what customers really value or the products and services they need, but have never experienced or would never think to request (Senge, 1990).
Recently it was reasoned that "a market-oriented and learning organisation is compatible with, if not implied by, the service-centered model" (Vargo and Lusch, 2002, p. 6). The service-centered view of marketing is customer-centric (Sheth et al., 2000) and market-driven (Day, 1999). This means more than simply being consumer-oriented; it means continually collaborating and learning with customers in order to respond to their individual and dynamic needs. Service-centered logic implies that value is defined by and co-created with the consumer and determined by the customer on the basis of value-in-use, rather than being embedded...