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Top1. Introduction
Under the service-dominant logic, enterprises can offer their applied resources for value creation and collaboratively (i.e., interactively) create value following the acceptance of value propositions but cannot create or deliver value independently, and the customer is always a co-creator of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2008). A large number of enterprises began to build information exchange platforms to interact with their customers and co-create value together, then, learning to co-create with customers became a new competitive advantage (Randall & Robert, 2004). For example, many enterprises are eager to collect customer information and promote connections between customers and companies, brands, and products through interactions, thereby gradually increasing the mutual benefit.
As a key in services marketing, interactions have been defined in the concept of service encounter (Lovelock & Wirtz, 2010), which include the interactions between customers and employees and between customers and non-interpersonal environment (Shostack, 1985). This article focuses on the former, because it is particularly important to the evaluation of service, which is about information exchange, collaboration, and cooperation (Nardi et al., 2019). Although service interaction has received a lot of attention, interactions do not necessarily have positive effects (Ennew & Binks, 1999; Bendapudi & Leone, 2003). In many cases, the processes of service interactions are not as good as enterprises expect (Dong et al., 2015), which has led to waste marketing resources with little effect (Guo & Sun, 2012). The possible explanation is that interaction is just a platform for value creation by organizations and customers, and it does not mean the two sides will make automatic impacts on each other (Grönroos & Voima, 2013).
Therefore, it is necessary to understand how service interaction improves value co-creation. However, previous research has neglected the mechanism behind this link, and there are only a few analyses (Chan, Chi, & Lam, 2010; Chi & Lam, 2012), except that some scholars explored this link from the perspective of resource integration (Davey & Gronroos, 2019). Then, interactions between participants can facilitate resource integration through dialogue, resource transfer and learning, which further influences value co-creation. However, the key to resource integration is the fit between or the consonance of resources, processes, and goals (Gummesson & Mele, 2010).
The concept of fit originates from interactive psychology (Cheng-Ping, 2018), which refers to the interactions between person and environment, such as person–job fit (Bhat & Rainayee, 2017) and person–organization fit (Kristof, 1996). Person–environment fit is generally defined as the compatibility between individuals and their environment (Van Vianen, 2018), suggests that “people have an innate need to fit their environments and to seek out environments that match their own characteristics” (Gander et al., 2020). The fit between person and environment is widely believed to have a positive impact on attitudes, behaviors, and performance (Kristof et al., 2005; Van Vianen, 2018). Although person–environment fit theory has been widely used in the work situation, it is rarely considered in the value co-creation activities from the perspective of customers. Furthermore, it is valuable to identify the connotation of person–environment fit in the service interaction context and the role in value co-creation. In fact, with the development of information technology, plenty of enterprises are using data mining technology and analysis technology to achieve a precise fit between customers and products. However, the products are not the only purpose of customers in the service interactions, and the display of the abilities and the value creation will be a serious matter.
The present study attempts to address these gaps by focusing on service interaction and examining its impact on customer value co-creation, which involves utilitarian and hedonic value. Building on two fit elements of person–job fit, we propose the concept of customer–task fit to explore the above mechanism, which includes a customer’s demand–ability fit, which refers to how the customer’s ability matches the value co-creation requirement, and customer’s needs–supply fit, which refers to the match a customer perceives between desired rewards and those offered by the company. More specifically, we propose to inspect demand–ability fit and needs–supply fit as serial mediators of the relationship between service interaction and customer value co-creation.