Customer Engagement in Service Innovation Performance of the Wellness Industry - Based on the fsQCA Method

Review Article

Phys Med Rehabil Int. 2023; 10(1): 1212.

Customer Engagement in Service Innovation Performance of the Wellness Industry - Based on the fsQCA Method

Wang Li1,2; D Myagmarsuren2*; Qin Yuanhao3; Z Yadmaa2; Liu shanshan1,2

¹School of Economics and Business, Chongqing Metropolitan College of Science and Technology, Chongqing, China

²School of Economics and Business, Mongolian University of Life Sciences, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

³School of Economics and Business, Chongqing Southwest University, Chongqing, China

*Corresponding author: D Myagmarsure School of Economics and Business, Mongolian University of Life Sciences, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Email: myagmarsuren.d@muls.edu.mn

Received: May 16, 2023 Accepted: June 15, 2023 Published: June 22, 2023

Abstract

This study uses complexity theory to explain and better understand the causal patterns of factors that stimulate customer engagement in service innovation performance of the wellness industry in a digital technology environment. To this end, it identifies digital technology and knowledge management as essential factors in service innovation from a customer perspective and proposes a conceptual model and three research propositions. To test the propositions, it employs fsQCA on a sample of 404 experienced customers in the wellness industry. Findings indicate that six configurations of customer perceived value and environmental conditions can explain the high quality of service innovation performance. This study contributes to the literature by offering new insights into the relationships among predictors of service innovation performance from a customer engagement perspective. And advancing the theoretical ground of how customer perceived value and environmental conditions (i.e., knowledge management, digital technology) combine to explain high-quality service innovation performance better. The findings support that the environment for customer engagement in service innovation needs to be more interactive to target customers’ perceived value and improve service innovation performance in the wellness industry.

Introduction

Digital technology has spawned a wave of innovation in business models and formats. Only through continuous Service Innovation (SI) can wellness enterprises gain a foothold in the market (Acset al., 2022; Lafuente et al., 2022). Due to the inseparability of service production and consumption, SI must pay attention to Customer Engagement (CE) (Bazi et al., 2020; Behnam et al., 2021; Naeem & Ozuem, 2021). Customers' choice determines the value an organization can capture now and in the future. Related research has primarily focused on Customer Motivation (CM), CE behavior, Perception Value (PV), and its influence tactics (Morgane et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2020; Baah et al., 2021; Li, 2021) [17]. However, many businesses cannot achieve the potential benefits of service innovation internally (Horv'ath & Rabetino, 2019) or find strategic benefits in the innovation-driven outcomes of different types of collaborative service innovation strategies (e.g., outsourcing, strategic alliance) (Wyrwich, 2019; Vaillant et al., 2021), especially for the wellness industry.

Recent years have witnessed a phenomenal rise in healthcare products, with the wellness industry constituting a significant market potential, with a 6.6% annual growth rate, significantly higher than global economic growth [28,31]. Wellness is the active pursuit of activities, choices, and lifestyles that lead to holistic health. The wellness economy encompasses industries that enable consumers to incorporate wellness activities and lifestyles into their daily lives. The wellness economy includes healthy eating, nutrition & weight loss, traditional, complementary medicine, personal care & beauty, physical activity, public health, prevention & personalized treatment, wellness real estate, wellness tourism, mental wellness, thermal/ mineral springs, spas, and workplace wellness in order of importance [31]. It is necessary to acquire insights into the matter to derive meaningful theoretical and practical implications.

Research into CE and SI is developing quickly. However, for the moment, there is still a significant gap in terms of identifying the pre-determinant factors leading to the wellness industry SI performance within a territory. Hence, this research sparked to gain an understanding of CE, CM, and PV, Customer Capability (CC), Knowledge Management (KM), and Digital Technology (DT) regarding the wellness industry SI from a customer perspective. And this paper employs fsQCA to detect causal combinations of conditions that elicit specific results. In contrast to regression-based models, fsQCA can handle asymmetric effects and provide insights into causal interactions between states [4]. Therefore, this study aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the CE in the wellness industry SI from a set-theoretic perspective and provide multiple triangulation findings. Section 2 provides an overview of the literature review on factors influencing SI and a hypothetical network of SI used to derive rules. Section 3 presents the research methodology. Section 4 presents the empirical results, and the paper's final section includes a discussion and conclusions highlighting practical implications.

Literature Review

Customer Engagement

CE in innovation is an important strategic choice for enterprises to achieve high-level SI performance (Endres et al., 2022; Kang et al., 2021; Tao et al., 2019) [13]. In the context of networking, digitization, and intelligence, CE actively interacts with other customers or companies to share, learn, and socialize through specific media to complete SI (Tang, 2017; Cui et al., 2022). It can meet customers' complex and subtle dynamic needs, shorten the service and product development cycle, reduce research and development costs, and improve the service experience (Yang, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). For wellness enterprises, CE can inspire customers` trust, publicity and recommendation, feedback, posting comments, loyalty, and satisfaction, and improve SI performance [19,26].

Customer Motivation

The goal is a cognitive representation of the desired end-state. When an enterprise incorporates customers into the SI process, the customer's willingness to cooperate and effort will also affect the progress and results of SI. Different motives (goals) influence CE behavior (Barbopoulos & Johansson, 2016). According to goal-framing theory, CM is an integrative construct encompassing three higher-order master goals (Barbopoulos & Johansson, 2017): hedonic ("to feel better right now"), normative ("to act appropriately"), and gain ("to guard and improve one's resources) (Lindenberg & Steg, 2007). These three overriding goals coincide with Vassileva's (2012) spectrum of motivational theories that refer to CM for CE.

The incentive mechanisms of service innovation in the wellness industry can be explained by the interplay between intrinsic motivations from within, driven by interests or enjoyment that individuals experience from engaging in an activity, and social motivations and the effects of reputation, which have meaning only in social environments. Meanwhile, extrinsic motivations, driven by external rewards, can also explain it (Fernandes and Castro, 2020; Karimi & Nickpayam, 2017; Zyminkowska et al., 2023; Romero, 2018).

Customer Capability

Customers need learning, recommendation, communication, and innovation ability to participate in service innovation. Then they can accurately transfer customer knowledge to wellness enterprise employees to promote service innovation (He et al., 2019; Viswanathan et al., 2018) [7].

Perceived Value

CE results from motivational drivers (Van Doorn et al., 2010; Verhoef et al., 2010). Customers only opt to engage to obtain their benefits in anticipation of securing more value (Hollebeek & Macky, 2019; Prentice & Loureiro, 2018; Prentice & Zhang, 2017). Customers PV by evaluating the judgement of benefits and sacrifices related to economic, emotional, experiential, symbolic, and social aspects (Khalifa, 2004; Talonen et al., 2016). Xie et al., (2021) surveyed visitors to hot spring resorts, national forest parks, mountain parks, and spa wellness facilities in Guangdong Province, China, and found that customer PV had a positive impact on CE. But the causes and effects of PV in wellness industry, from the perspective of value co-creation, is a rather unexplored area of study.

Knowledge Management

Researchers also explored the factors affecting innovative customer behavior at the organizational level (EI-Kassar et al., 2022) [14]. Under the guidance of organizational character traits, knowledge resources can be bundled and combined in a personalized form. Thus creating a solid enterprise KM ability to effectively promote the wellness industry SI [26].

Digital Technology

The development of information technology, especially social media using has continuously innovated the ways for customers to participate in SI (Zhao et al., 2020). Different SI methods depend on different technical levels, and many new service innovation methods are the application of advanced ideas and technologies. With the development of technology, the way CE in SI is constantly changing (Du et al., 2018; Zhao, 2018) [5]. DT can effectively improve the channel and efficiency of enterprise resource integration (Silic et al., 2020). Social media promotes enterprise reorganization and utilization of resources, especially the more convenient knowledge transfer between customers and employees (Cai et al., 2019; Huang et al., 2017), and carry out more SI activities to enhance EP (Zhao et al., 2022).

Service innovation. The SI theory originated from Schumpeter's research on manufacturing innovation from the perspective of technological innovation. Later, under the promotion of a large number of scholars, it experienced the evolution of technological innovation to SI, then to technology and service integration, and open innovation. But SI go beyond simple transactional value-chain exchanges to include a rich and complex ecosystem of platform-based data collection, information processes, and knowledge interaction (Hou & Shi, 2021; Tian et al., 2021).

This study aims to examine the effect of CE on wellness industry SI by presenting a configuration of causally related multi-group factor structures. Based on related literature [22] and using complexity theory analyzed by Woodside (2014), this study shows that CE, CM, CC, DT, KM, and PV are essential antecedents of SI in wellness enterprises.

Research Design

Nomological Net

In line with respective usage in studies utilizing multivariate techniques, this research hypothesized that six conditions positively affect SI because the causal combination is sufficient to evoke the presence of motivated behaviors. This study conceptualization hypothesizes that DT and CE may interact, as PV may be a response to perceived CC and CM. Further encounters with KM considerations are secondary in situations with this configuration. Ensuring that knowledge flows between customers and employees is a service exhibited in a particular case, usually a function of the organization's environment. Hence, there are many findings with significant effects on SI from both positive and negative affective [10], leading to the following proposition:

Proposition 1: No single best configuration leads to high SI, but multiple, equally effective designs of causal factors exist.

Proposition 2: Single causal conditions may be present or absent within configurations for high SI, depending on how they combine with other causal conditions.

Proposition 3: Configurations that lead to high SI will require high-quality service innovation conditions provided by wellness companies.

Method

The primary purpose of this research is to examine the impact of multiple factors on SI in the wellness industry. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is an empirical method based on Boolean algebra and fuzzy set theory. This paper employs it to analyze situations with multiple combinations of features. QCA allows one to theorize pattern configurations between cases to identify similarities and differences (Ragin, 1987, 2008; Rihoux & Ragin, 2009) [23]. This research employs the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method (fsQCA), which integrates the advantages of qualitative and quantitative research and is used for empirical analysis (Pappas & Woodside, 2021). It is a subset of the QCA method, which can use continuous or interval scale variables (Ragin, 2008). FsQCA takes into account the degree variation of the variable, can be calibrated for any value between 0 (i.e., full non-membership in the set) and 1 (i.e., full membership), and reveals multiple combinations with equivalent results (Gligor & Bozkurt, 2020) [21]. Therefore, this paper chooses fsQCA.

The questionnaire is released using the Questionnaire Star platform and sampled through the snowball method of the investigators. Before the research survey question, the respondents were given a consent form, having read through and comprehended our study's purpose and objectives. In addition, the question at the beginning of the questionnaire is to ensure eligible respondent eligibility:" Have you ever participated in wellness service innovation?"

For the issue of CE in the wellness industry, SI combined the studies of Morrison (1993), Ennew and Binks (1999), and Yi and Gong (2013) and finally extracted seven items to gain a more comprehensive understanding—the five items of CM derived from the research of Wang and Xue (2008). CC generalizes the item of He and Chen (2009) to study subjects. Item DT is from Trainor et al. (2014) based on Jayachandran et al. (2005), who generalized them from studies to examine SI in the context of DT. The KM item has three questions, all derived from the research of Cui and Wu (2016). PV items measured in five parts take the role of functional value, social value, emotional value, epistemic value, and conditional value, which come from the research of Sheth et al. (1991), and Sweeney and Soutar (2001). SI items measured financial indicators, customer indicators, and internal indicators by Storey & Kelly (2002), Hsueh et al. (2010), and Yang and Tian (2015). All variables were measured using a 5-point Likert scale.

Tourists who have traveled to the Chongqing forest wellness base are the target population. The wellness industry is a strategic pillar for the development of Chongqing with a complete wellness industry supply chain (Li & Chen, 2022; Wang et al., 2023) [19]. In addition, Chongqing has built 85 forest parks above the municipal level, 26 wetland parks, 36 scenic spots, and ten geological parks. There are more than 40 wellness bases, more than 1,800 green demonstration villages, nearly 100 leading forestry enterprises above the municipal level, and more than 4,000 forest families. The added value of forestry and related industries accounts for more than 5% of the GDP. The added value of forest tourism and wellness industries has reached nearly 40 billion yuan, receiving 657 million domestic and foreign tourists yearly (Department of Technology and Big Data, 2019). A two-stage cluster sampling method is adopted, such as selecting the wellness industry's branch field and choosing a region.

Results

Descriptive Statistics

Four hundred fifty-four questionnaires collect over seven weeks from February to April 2023. After eliminating all questionnaires in which respondents gave the same answers to all questions and those with a rapid answering time (100s less than the average response time), 404 valid questionnaires were ultimately obtained, with an effective rate of 89.1% (Table 1).