Investigating customer engagement behavior and its impact on customer engagement value: a conceptual framework

In an increasingly dynamic business environment, firms are realizing the importance of collaboration for creating and sustaining competitive advantage. Collaboration with partners and even competitors has become a strategic imperative for firms in the networked world of business. More recently, scholars in strategy and marketing have focused on collaboration with customers to co-create value (Sawhney, 2005). Customer was considered as exogenous to the firm and the passive recipient of the firm’s active value creation efforts, and values created in the “factory” (Bijmolt et al., 2010; Deshpande, 1983). A different perspective is now emerging, namely, that customers can co-create value, co-create competitive strategy, collaborate in the firm’s innovation process, and become endogenous to the firm (Bijmolt et al., 2010). Increased competition prompts wireless telecommunication industry to reconsider the economic value of customer retention and to reconsider the customer engagement behaviour of the subscribers. In this study, we examine the customer engagement behaviour, which is crucial nowadays to the sustainability of the firms. This research seek to provide customer engagement behaviours as a construct affecting the customer engagement values to captures how and why customers behave in numerous ways that are relevant to the firm and its multiple stakeholders using structural equation modelling analysis. More specifically, the research therefore, is focused on determining the significance of the following antecedents of the customer engagement behaviour which were recommended through the future recommendations in previous researches including, satisfaction, trust/commitment, word-of-mouth, and competitive factors on the four values of customer engagement including customer lifetime value (CLV), customer referral value (CRV), customer influencer value (CIV) and customer knowledge value (CKV).