Service Dominant Logic in Practice: Applying Online Customer Communities and Personas for the Creation of Service Innovations

Many companies try to adopt a service-oriented perspective when developing new offerings. Drawing on a case study with the Swiss Federal Railways (SFR), it is explored how “value-in-context” and “cocreation” can be put into practice. The findings suggest, that personas that were constructed based on the results from an online customer community can help managers to improve their offerings in a service-oriented way. The service-oriented perspective supports the search for innovation potential by posing the question of how the creation of value jointly with customers can be improved. This requires a holistic view of customers, along with customer details beyond retrospective methods such as surveys or interviews. Observations of everyday life provide a valuable complement, because they initiate innovations not explicitly based on wishes formulated by customers, but on customer practices. Online customer communities are a very helpful tool to get a holistic view of customers. They unveil value-in-context and practices of customers which are important sources of innovation. They allow customers to play an active role in the innovation process. “Value-in-context” data and practices have to be presented in a way that researchers, marketing specialists and developers can understand and use it for developing new services. The persona approach consolidates user behaviour and contextual data and is therefore a powerful tool for putting service orientation into practice. Using self-reporting tools, like an online community helps companies to get a holistic view of their customers and strengthens their active role in the innovation process. Personas are a valuable method to present the customer data in a way that developers and marketers can “translate” the customer insights into service-oriented new offerings.