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The ongoing proliferation of digital technologies is reshaping the customer-firm relationship by providing new possibilities for companies and customers to interact with each other. Companies try to involve customers in firm-sponsored online customer networks to connect them more deeply with the brand. In this context, the impact of positive social influence induced among customers on their value contribution has been acknowledged, however, research often neglects the impact of negative social influence. We propose therefore a novel approach to account for direct and indirect as well as positive and negative social influence between customers in online customer networks to calculate customers’ integrated value contribution. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach using an illustrative online customer network. Our approach allows practitioners to evaluate customers’ “true” value in online customer networks by preventing over- and underestimation of customers’ value contribution., Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Seoul, South Korea, December 10-14, 2017.

The digital transformation leads to an enormous change in the customer-firm relationship. Recently launched firm-sponsored online customer networks enable customers to actively interact with the company and other customers in form of social engagement activities like asking and answering questions or receiving feedback. Despite the increasing importance of online customer networks, existing literature still lacks an in-depth understanding of the impact of social engagement on customer profitability based on real-world data regarding both customers’ social engagement activities and customers’ profitability. Our paper therefore aims at providing insights about the relationship between different forms of customers’ social engagement and customers’ profitability based on an extensive dataset of a German direct banking institution’s online customer network. We found, for example, that – in contrast to posting answers – raising questions in the online customer network is associated with significantly higher profitability of the respective customers. Our study leads to interesting results exceeding existing research and helping practitioners to manage online customer networks more effectively and to focus on and foster particularly promising forms of customers’ social engagement., Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Guimarães, Portugal, June 12-15, 2017 (pp. 2101-2118). ISBN 978-989-207655 Research Papers

The rapid growth of the Internet has led to a revolution in the relationship between customers and companies. After the first experiences on social media platforms, companies started hosting their own online customer networks where formerly passive consuming customers are able to connect, share, and cooperate with each other and the company. This social engagement of customers is generally considered as an incredible value for the hosting company. However, while previous research regularly takes a positive relationship between users’ social engagement and customer profitability in online customer networks for granted, there is still a lack of research rigorously analyzing this aspect in detail. Against this background, the aim of our paper is to provide an in-depth investigation of the relationship between users’ social engagement and customer profitability in online customer networks using a unique dataset of a German direct banking institution. This leads to interesting results that do not support either existing statements in literature or best current practices. Indeed, in our case we do not generally observe significant higher social engagement for “buyers” compared with “nonbuyers”., Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Istanbul, Turkey, June 12-15, 2016 (pp. 1-15). Research Papers