Towards Joint Value Creation Processes in Professional Services

In this paper, we study customer relationships in professional services. Focus is especially directed towards learning and personnel development services that are provided for the customer organisations. Learning and personnel development services include different kinds of courses and personnel development plans that are provided for the customer organisation and for its personnel. In business-to-business context, such services are very complex in nature and require special attention from marketers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for managing such professional service relationships in a way that creates value for the both parties and enables the marketer to discover also those customer needs, which the customer itself is not even aware of. Furthermore, our intention is to show how a professional service company can benefit from understanding its customer’s value creation process. The basic idea is that every customer has own processes by which it creates value through its business activities. By understanding these processes the provider can identify much more deeply all the concerns and goals related to customer’s business activities. In this way the producer can provide better solutions for the customer and build a lasting relationship with the customer. However, the way the service provider is going to answer to the needs of the customer always has to be profitable to the provider, at least when evaluated in the long run. In other words, the main idea is to connect one’s own core competencies and value creation process to the value creation process of the customer. Through this kind of zippering both parties of the relationship are ready to adapt their processes to each other so that the value is created for both. Furthermore, our overall aim is to illustrate the benefits of zippering with the help of a case company, which provides learning and research services for other companies. Our intention is 1 The term Zippering is a process tool developed by CRM Customer Relationship Management Ltd. to achieve this aim by defining the process by which the customer companies develop their personnel and by identifying the concerns they have in these processes. After identifying these, one can create a strategy that can be used in zippering the processes of the customer and the provider together.