Service Customization: Optimizing Value Creation and Capture by Designing the Customer Journey

Service customization is a central issue in sociotechnical service ecosystems, enabled and fueled by new data-driven approaches, and with the goal of increasing value creation for the customer, and value capture for the provider. In this paper, we address the question of how to design service customization within the provider-customer interaction. We propose a novel quantitative approach for modeling the relation between customization level at the various steps of the customer journey on the one hand, and its effect on the value created for customer and provider on the other hand. Combining this model with approaches from multi-objective optimization, optimum levels of customization from both the customer and the provider perspective can be determined. Thus, the proposed model allows the identification of service designs which are optimized in terms of their value creation and value capture.