Will User Involvement Always be the Case? The Effect of Service Procurement on Customer Perceived Value in Servitization

As service is becoming increasingly important, many industrial firms have implemented “servitization” strategy and many marketing and management researchers have discussed the topic of business service. This paper focuses on business service types and its impacts from the buyer’s perceptive, especially whether user involvement always takes effects on the process of servitization. Using a large sample survey, this study examines the relationship between two types of business service and customer perceived value in terms of economic value, relational /support value and technical/core value as well as the moderating effect of user involvement on this relationship in China fine chemical industry. The results show that both two service types can bring economic value and technical/core value to the buyers, the difference here is the relational/ support value can only be perceived if the buyer purchases the operant resource based service. The results also suggest that user involvement is a moderator in the relationship between both operand and operant resource based service on customer perceived technical/core value.