Customer Activity: A Research Agenda

This chapter presents a research agenda for customer activity-focused service research. Customer activities are characterized as discrete units of behavior, which customers carry out to facilitate the emergence of value in their own lives or businesses. In this context, service can be viewed as an enabling element, which customers engage in to make their own activities possible. This activity perspective on service use opens up several new and interesting research areas, such as the analysis of customer activity networks, the role of services in such networks, and the development of the customer’s activities around service use. The chapter ends with a discussion on the use of conventional and more innovative methodologies to empirically examine these topics.