Customer Value Co-Creation Scale (CVCS)

Abstract

The Customer Value Co-Creation Scale (CVCS) is an empirically validated, multidimensional psychometric instrument designed to measure the behavioral manifestations of customer involvement in the co-creation of value within service ecosystems. Grounded conceptually in the paradigm of Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic pioneered by Vargo and Lusch (2004) and formally operationalized by Youjae Yi and Taeshik Gong (2013), the instrument captures how consumers act as active resource integrators rather than passive recipients of commercial outputs. The validated instrument operationalizes value co-creation across four pivotal behavioral dimensions: Information Sharing, Responsible Behavior, Personal Interaction, and Feedback. Comprising 16 core items evaluated on a standard 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), the CVCS demonstrates exceptional psychometric properties across diverse service contexts, including financial services, healthcare, hospitality, education, and digital platforms. Across foundational and contemporary validation studies, the scale exhibits robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically spanning 0.82 to 0.93 across subscales; Composite Reliability > 0.85), distinct convergent validity (Average Variance Extracted > 0.55), rigorous discriminant validity via the Fornell–Larcker criterion and Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratios, and strong criterion-related validity. Structural equation models consistently affirm that scores on the CVCS significantly predict downstream organizational and psychological outcomes, such as perceived service quality, customer satisfaction, affective brand commitment, and repurchase intentions, over and above provider-side functional inputs.

Keywords

Customer value co-creation, Service-Dominant Logic, customer participation behavior, customer citizenship behavior, psychometrics, scale validation, Yi and Gong, service marketing, consumer behavior, personal interaction, information sharing, service quality.

Authors

The primary architects of the standardized customer value co-creation measurement framework are Youjae Yi and Taeshik Gong:

• Youjae Yi, Ph.D. — Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Business School, Seoul National University, South Korea. Dr. Yi is an internationally recognized scholar in customer relationship management, service marketing, and consumer satisfaction modeling. His foundational work on service quality, customer participation, and customer loyalty has appeared extensively in top-tier marketing outlets, including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
• Taeshik Gong, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing and Service Science. Dr. Gong has held academic appointments at institutions such as the University of Strathclyde and Hanyang University. His empirical research focuses predominantly on service-dominant logic, organizational frontline dynamics, customer value co-creation behavior, and customer engagement psychology.

Their seminal collaborative paper, “Customer value co-creation behavior: Scale development and validation”, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2013), formalized the operationalization of customer co-creation behaviors through multi-sample empirical investigations across different service industries.

Purpose

Historically, mainstream economic theory and classical marketing frameworks adhered strictly to a Goods-Dominant (G-D) logic. Within this conventional view, value was conceptualized as an intrinsic attribute embedded in physical goods or discrete service performances during manufacturing or execution (termed value-in-exchange). Customers were regarded merely as external evaluators and passive consumers of finished organizational offerings. The introduction of Service-Dominant Logic by Vargo and Lusch (2004) catalyzed a paradigm shift by asserting that value is never merely delivered; rather, it is uniquely and collaboratively realized during consumption (termed value-in-use or value-in-context). Under this framework, the customer is fundamentally an operant resource who actively participates in value emergence.

Despite wide theoretical acceptance of S-D Logic during the early 2000s, empirical research was hindered by the absence of a psychometrically validated, standardized tool capable of capturing behavioral value co-creation. The CVCS was engineered to resolve this empirical bottleneck. Its core purposes include:

• Behavioral Quantification: Disentangling psychological attitudes from concrete, observable customer behaviors that directly alter service delivery and outcomes.
• Delineating Core Customer Roles: Differentiating in-role requirements (behaviors mandatory for successful service execution) from proactive, discretionary interpersonal or organizational contributions.
• Diagnostic Assessment for Service Design: Offering service managers, clinical coordinators, and platform engineers a granular diagnostic instrument to determine where customer integration fails (e.g., whether breakdowns stem from inadequate Information Sharing versus hostile Personal Interaction).
• Academic and Field Research: Providing a rigorous structural measurement tool for modeling the antecedents (e.g., employee empathy, customer self-efficacy, digital interface usability) and consequences (e.g., service recovery success, well-being, trust, customer lifetime value) of collaborative customer agency.

Beyond traditional commercial domains, the CVCS is heavily applied in therapeutic, educational, and healthcare settings where client outcomes strictly depend on bilateral resource integration, transparent communication, role compliance, and constructive feedback loops.

Psychological Construct

The construct of customer value co-creation behavior operates as a multifaceted, hierarchical behavioral architecture. While broader marketing theory conceptualizes co-creation across both in-role participation and extra-role citizenship, the focal measurement system evaluates four primary behavioral dimensions that govern the frontline interface between the client and the service entity:

1. Information Sharing

Information Sharing refers to the customer’s proactive, accurate, and timely disclosure of necessary personal data, contextual details, service expectations, and operational preferences required for the provider to perform their duties effectively. In modern complex services (such as medical diagnosis, financial advising, legal consulting, or customized software deployment), the provider possesses specialized procedural expertise but relies entirely on the consumer’s operant knowledge regarding their unique situation. Deficits in information sharing introduce operational friction, task ambiguity, and suboptimal service customization. Illustrative behaviors include explicitly detailing symptoms to a physician, clarifying project requirements to a consultant, or systematically answering an intake questionnaire.

2. Responsible Behavior

Responsible Behavior reflects the customer’s adherence to procedural norms, behavioral guidelines, professional instructions, and contractual duties intrinsic to the service arrangement. Grounded in role theory, this dimension conceptualizes the customer as a “partial employee” of the organization who must enact baseline institutional duties to avoid service degradation. Failure to exhibit responsible behavior—such as arriving late for a high-dependency appointment, ignoring safety protocols in a gym, or neglecting dietary recommendations in healthcare—impairs service efficiency not only for the focal customer but often for other consumers sharing the service ecosystem.

3. Personal Interaction

Personal Interaction represents the relational, affective, and interpersonal conduct displayed by the customer toward frontline employees and service personnel. This encompasses mutual respect, courtesy, civility, kindness, emotional regulation, and friendliness. Rather than purely social pleasantries, personal interaction functions as a critical psychological lubricant that fosters social capital and positive affective climate within the dyad. When customers behave discourteously or rudely, frontline employees experience emotional exhaustion and cognitive burnout, which degrades technical performance. Conversely, polite and respectful interaction generates positive emotional contagion, psychological safety, and heightened willingness among staff to expend discretionary effort on the customer’s behalf.

4. Feedback

Feedback encompasses constructive evaluation, suggestions, and corrective observations offered by the customer to frontline staff or organizational managers to improve ongoing or future service experiences. Unlike malicious complaining or unconstructive venting, co-creative feedback is inherently developmental. It includes informing employees of operational bottlenecks, commending exemplary service performances, and articulating procedural flaws directly to staff before escalation. Through feedback, customers act as external consultants, transferring actionable environmental data into the firm’s internal learning loops to drive service innovation and continuous improvement.

Theoretical Framework

The Customer Value Co-Creation Scale is synthesized from several converging foundational theories across marketing, social psychology, and organizational behavior:

Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic)

First articulated by Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2008, 2016), S-D Logic serves as the primary epistemological foundation for the CVCS. The core foundational premises (FPs) underpinning the scale include:

• FP6: Value is co-created by multiple actors, always including the beneficiary. Value cannot be manufactured unilaterally by an enterprise and handed over as an output; it emerges strictly through joint resource integration.
• FP9: All social and economic actors are resource integrators. The customer does not merely consume resources; they contribute their own operant resources (skills, cognitive attention, communication, physical effort) to the service process.
• FP10: Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary. Because value is realized in use, the quality of value realization is structurally dependent on how effectively the customer integrates their resources with those of the provider.

Social Exchange Theory (SET)

Under Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964; Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005), interpersonal and socio-economic interactions are sustained through expectations of mutual reciprocity. When service providers demonstrate attentiveness, technical competence, and high organizational support, customers feel a normative and psychological obligation to reciprocate. Within the CVCS, this reciprocal exchange manifests through constructive behaviors such as sharing complete information, interacting cordially, adhering to regulations, and offering valuable feedback to safeguard the relationship.

Role Theory and the “Partial Employee” Concept

Drawing on structural role theory (Solomon et al., 1985) and organizational socialization models (Bowen, 1986; Mills & Morris, 1986), service interactions are framed as scripted interactive performances. To maximize performance outcomes, participants must clearly understand their scripts (role clarity), possess the competence to execute them (role ability), and perceive tangible value in doing so (role motivation). The dimensions of Information Sharing and Responsible Behavior represent the customer’s execution of their formal “job description” as a partial employee of the service enterprise.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) Mapping

The scale adapts Dennis Organ’s (1988) classical conceptualization of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) to the consumer domain (Bettencourt, 1997; Groth, 2005). Just as internal employees exhibit discretionary behaviors that promote organizational effectiveness without formal contractual compulsion, customers enact Customer Citizenship Behaviors (CCBs). Specifically, dimensions like Feedback represent proactive, extra-role contributions targeted at institutional development.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the CVCS has been confirmed through extensive empirical testing utilizing multi-phase scale development protocols:

Content and Face Validity

The generation of the original item pool involved exhaustive reviews of the organizational citizenship, service quality, and relationship marketing literatures, combined with exploratory depth interviews with consumers and frontline employees. Panels of expert psychometricians and service marketing professors systematically evaluated the initial items, assessing semantic clarity, representativeness, and face validity. Iterative rounds of card-sorting and linguistic refinement reduced redundancy and eliminated ambiguous phrasing, yielding a theoretically grounded instrument.

Convergent Validity

In structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analyses across various empirical samples (e.g., Yi & Gong, 2013), convergent validity has been established by the following metrics:

• All standardized factor loadings (λ) for the items on their respective latent dimensions are statistically significant (p < 0.001) and exceed the standard 0.70 benchmark, ranging primarily between 0.73 and 0.91.
• The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for each of the four dimensions consistently surpasses the recommended 0.50 threshold, routinely achieving values between 0.58 and 0.76.
• Composite Reliability (CR) indices for all latent subscales exceed 0.80, indicating high shared variance among the indicator variables.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity between the four dimensions has been verified through multiple psychometric methods:

• Fornell–Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for each latent factor is higher than any bivariate correlation between that factor and any other construct in the measurement model.
• HTMT Ratios: In contemporary re-examinations utilizing the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (Henseler et al., 2015), all values remain well below the conservative threshold of 0.85, establishing that Information Sharing, Responsible Behavior, Personal Interaction, and Feedback represent distinct empirical constructs rather than overlapping facets.
• Chi-Square Difference Tests: Nested model comparisons restricting the inter-factor correlations to unity (φ = 1.00) show a statistically significant degradation in model fit compared to the unconstrained four-factor model.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

The CVCS exhibits strong predictive and nomological validity when integrated into broader structural models. Studies demonstrate that customer value co-creation behaviors account for substantial variance in:

• Customer Perceived Value: Both utilitarian (functional) and hedonic value assessments increase significantly as customer co-creation intensity rises.
• Service Quality Perceptions: Because customers who provide adequate information and execute instructions correctly facilitate higher service delivery accuracy, their subjective quality ratings increase (β values typically between 0.35 and 0.55).
• Customer Satisfaction and Well-Being: Engagement in co-creation increases psychological ownership over the service outcome, boosting overall satisfaction and emotional attachment to the brand.
• Repurchase and Advocacy Intentions: Co-creation acts as an antecedent to customer retention, brand evangelism, and positive word-of-mouth (WOM).

Reliability

The reliability of the CVCS has been documented across numerous studies spanning various industries and geographical contexts:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s α):
  • Information Sharing: Consistently demonstrates Cronbach’s α coefficients between 0.84 and 0.91.
  • Responsible Behavior: Yields α values ranging from 0.81 to 0.89.
  • Personal Interaction: Displays high internal consistency, with α values between 0.87 and 0.94.
  • Feedback: Exhibits α coefficients spanning 0.82 to 0.88.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Raykov’s composite reliability and McDonald’s ω indices consistently match or exceed the Cronbach’s α statistics, remaining safely above the 0.80 benchmark across all four dimensions.
• Test-Retest Stability: Longitudinal research designs tracking customer behaviors across repeated service episodes (e.g., higher education terms, recurring healthcare regimens) show stable test-retest correlation coefficients (r > 0.75 across a 4-to-6-week interval), indicating that while co-creation can adapt to service interventions, individual behavioral tendencies maintain meaningful temporal stability.

Factor Analysis

The structural topology of the CVCS was derived through rigorous factor-analytic procedures:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development, Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) and Maximum Likelihood extraction with oblique rotation (such as Promax or Oblimin) were employed due to the theoretical expectation that co-creation dimensions are correlated. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measures of sampling adequacy consistently exceeded 0.88, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance (p < 0.001), indicating adequate correlation matrices. The eigenvalues-greater-than-one rule and parallel analysis consistently confirmed a four-factor solution representing the four behavioral dimensions. Items demonstrated clean structural loadings (> 0.65) on their primary targets with negligible cross-loadings (< 0.25).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation utilizing Confirmatory Factor Analysis via AMOS, LISREL, or R (lavaan) has repeatedly validated the multidimensional structure. Representative goodness-of-fit indices across published empirical tests typically yield:

• Model Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: χ²/df values between 1.45 and 2.65, within the acceptable < 3.0 standard.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values routinely exceed 0.94, often reaching 0.97 to 0.98.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Consistently reported between 0.93 and 0.97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range from 0.038 to 0.058 (with 90% confidence intervals spanning comfortably below the 0.08 cutoff), accompanied by non-significant p-values for close fit (PCLOSE > 0.05).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Remains low, typically between 0.031 and 0.049.

Competing structural models (such as single-factor models or orthogonal solutions) consistently show poor fit (e.g., CFI < 0.75, RMSEA > 0.12), confirming that customer value co-creation operates as an interrelated multidimensional construct.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Customer Value Co-Creation Scale are summarized below:

• Construct Measured: Customer value co-creation behavior across frontline service environments.
• Theoretical Basis: Service-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch), Social Exchange Theory, and Role Theory.
• Format & Administration: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey questionnaire. Can also be adapted for retrospective service-encounter evaluations or other-report (employee rating customer behavior).
• Target Population: Adult consumers, clients, patients, or platform users engaging in interactive service relationships.
• Total Item Count: 16 items.
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Information Sharing: 4 items (Items 1–4)
  • Responsible Behavior: 4 items (Items 5–8)
  • Personal Interaction: 5 items (Items 9–13)
  • Feedback: 3 items (Items 14–16)
• Response Scale: Standard 7-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat Disagree
  • 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Protocol: Dimension scores are calculated by averaging the items within each subscale:
  • Information Sharing Score: Sum of Items 1 to 4 divided by 4.
  • Responsible Behavior Score: Sum of Items 5 to 8 divided by 4.
  • Personal Interaction Score: Sum of Items 9 to 13 divided by 5.
  • Feedback Score: Sum of Items 14 to 16 divided by 3.
  • Overall Co-Creation Index: An aggregate composite score can be computed by calculating the grand mean across all 16 items.
• Reverse Scoring: All 16 items are phrased positively; there are no reverse-coded items. Higher scores reflect greater levels of value co-creation behavior.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 4 to 6 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was formally published in 2013 in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science by Youjae Yi and Taeshik Gong. The conceptual and empirical work is copyrighted by the Academy of Marketing Science (Springer Science+Business Media). Under standard academic fair-use conventions, the scale items may be utilized, adapted, and reproduced free of charge for non-commercial academic research, university dissertations, and scientific study, provided proper bibliographic citation is given to Yi and Gong (2013). Commercial organizations seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary employee evaluation suites, commercial diagnostics, or fee-based customer feedback software should obtain relevant copyright clearance or permissions from the publisher or original authors.

References

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• Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2008). Service-dominant logic: Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-007-0069-6
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• Yi, Y., & Gong, T. (2013). Customer value co-creation behavior: Scale development and validation. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 41(6), 702–724. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-012-0320-x

Items of the Scale