Going beyond transactions:Theoretical perspectives and empirical studies on customer engagement behavior effectiveness

Recent societal developments have altered customer-firm interactions. Social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube) substantially increased the connectivity among customers and between customers and firms. Nowadays the relationship between customers and firms is no longer restricted to the moment of purchase. Customers communicate with other customers and/or companies outside the moment of purchase and do so more widespread, faster, and interactive than ever before. For instance, customers tweet about the latest movie they saw, customers like or comment on a company’s Facebook page, and/or customers post videos of themselves driving an expensive car. In light of these developments and their potential impact, customer engagement behaviors (i.e., non-transactional customer behaviors, such as customer word-of-mouth, customer co-creation in new product development, and customer feedback) have become a very important topic for companies.Despite the theoretical and managerial relevance of customer engagement behaviors, thorough empirical research on the effectiveness of customer engagement behaviors is largely lacking. This dissertation addresses this gap. In three interrelated research projects this dissertation identifies suited theoretical perspectives on outcomes of customer engagement behavior, empirically studies the impact of customer engagement behaviors on an individual customer performance metric (i.e., customer satisfaction) and an aggregated firm performance metric (i.e., market valuation), and identifies contingencies that drive these outcomes