Customer value‐chain involvement for co‐creating customer delight

Traditional marketing strategies assume that customers involve (e.g. search, assess, purchase, use) with products or services mostly at the end of their value chain as finished market offerings. This article challenges managers to invite target customers to be involved at all stages of the value chain. The specific purpose of our new customer‐value‐chain involvement (CVCI) model is to enhance customer relationship management in conjunction with supply chain management, employee relationship management) and retailer partners’ relationship management. There are definite advantages to CVCI as it can provide continuous customer feedback and enable more objective quality assessment and judgment, but most importantly, it can elevate customer satisfaction to customer delight that spawns lifetime loyalty and positive referrals. The importance and managerial implications of CVCI are discussed.