Virtual Customer Environments: IT-Enabled Customer Co-innovation and Value Co-creation - Information Technology and Product Development - page 116

and with tools and technologies. Consider the following comment from a customer:
“I have always enjoyed solving technical puzzles and my interactions [in the VCE]
have given me numerous opportunities to indulge in such pursuits that are very
satisfying.”
Together, the four components offer a holistic view of the experience a customer
participating in a VCE can have. Preliminary evidence (Nambisan & Nambisan,
2008) indicates that based on the nature of the customer's interactions and value
co-creation activities, some components are likely to be more important than others.
For example, it was found that VCEs oriented toward product support activ-
ities tend to feature lively discussions and debates that leverage the expertise of
the entire community and make them better able to address individual customer's
product-related problems. As such, the customer experience profiles tend to be
skewed toward pragmatic and sociability experience components. By contrast, vir-
tual environments that focus on helping customers become product conceptualizers
tend to be more stimulating for participants as product improvement ideas are devel-
oped, shared, and improved upon. Thus, in these VCEs, the emphasis tends to be on
pragmatic and hedonic components.
Future studies may examine these in more detail and develop a deeper under-
standing of how customer experience profile is tied with the nature of their
innovation and value-creation activities in the VCE.
Another valuable research avenue relates to the organizational mechanisms that
companies can deploy to enhance customer experience in VCEs. It is evident that
each company would need to examine its own circumstances and weigh the unique
product and customer context in order to decide which customer experience profile
is most appropriate. A clear understanding of this - specifically, the relative impor-
tance of the different experience components - could help companies tailor their
VCE strategies and practices.

6.5 Impact of Customer Participation in VCEs

There is a vast literature on the impact of customer involvement in innovation and
value creation. This literature has identified two broad sets of outcomes - customer
relationship management (CRM) related outcomes and innovation-related outcomes
(see Fig. 6.2).

Innovation Related
Outcomes

Dimensions of Customer
Experience in VCEs

￿ Pragmatic

￿ Sociability
￿ Usability

￿ Hedonic

Customer Relationship
Management (CRM)
Related Outcomes

Fig. 6.2 Customer
Experience in VCEs and their
Impact