Valua co-creation, tourist satisfaction and tourist loyalty in Tien Giang province
Abstract
Customers are the ones who decide the success or failure of a business. For this reason, understanding customers’ demands and expectations is a very important task of any business. Thus, customer involvement in the product / service creation will be the driver to success. Nonetheless, value co-creation is still a new research concept. There are not many studies on this topic, especially in Vietnam context. The author provides a model to investigate the relationship between co-creation and tourists’ satisfaction as well as their loyalty in the context of Tien Giang tourism sector. This research also aims at examining the factors (communication, customer expertise, affective commitment and interactional justice) likely to increase the value co-creation level. The study is conducted from September, 2015 to January, 2016 with a sample size of 280 respondents. The data are analyzed by SPSS and AMOS software. The research’s finding reveals that the better customer service (meaningful customer-employee communication and fair client-staff interaction) and customer expertise will have positive impacts on value co-creation. Hence, travel agencies should improve its customer service as well as enhance customer knowledge to boost the value co-creation process. The research’s result also supports the relationship between value co-creation and tourist loyalty, which means that value co-creation may play an important role as a basis for gaining competitive advantage in the tourism industry. Tourism service providers should foster the customer engagement in the value co-creation process as well as create favorable conditions so that tourists can perform co-creation activities.