The role of customer operant resources in health care value creation

Service-dominant logic advocates that customers co-create value with a firm by contributing operant resources. However, do their operant resources contribute to improving the co-created value, or are they just a must? To address this question, this research investigates the effect of different components of customer operant resource on different forms of customer value in the context of health care service. A structural model was developed and tested using a sample of 409 outpatients in Vietnam. Results show that customer’s social and cultural resources (but not physical resource) have significant effects on process value, while social, cultural, and physical resources have significant effects on outcome value. Among the three forms of operant resource, social resource is found to have the strongest effect on both process and outcome values. In addition, the relative effects of each form of operant resource on process and outcome values change when customers become more familiar to the service. Finally, both process and outcome values explain an essential part of the positive word-of-mouth behavior. Theoretical and managerial implications have then been discussed.