A Sustainable Innovation—Additional Services for Products Based on Personalised Customer Value

Abstract

As a sustainable innovation, offering additional services for products (ASP) is rapidly emerging as an increasingly important consideration for manufactories. Although additional services can increase enhance product utility, there is no guarantee that they will be accepted by customers. This may lead to a waste of product and service resources. Customer acceptance is a prerequisite for sustainability. However, existing service evaluation methods do not support the evaluation of customer acceptance of ASP prior to implementation. We confirmed that customer value can be used to evaluate customer acceptance of ASP based on the conclusion that this factor plays a decisive role in customer acceptance and customer value can be used to evaluate products and services. Then we establish an evaluation model to measure the difference in customer value between products with and without ASP. Utility, input, and supply–demand coefficient were used to quantitatively describe the personalised customer value of customer segments. This approach supports manufacturers in the process of estimating customer acceptance of ASP prior to the allocation of service resources to the implementation of procedure. Using this model, manufactories can provide the most acceptable ASP for different customer groups with less service resources. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method to measure customer acceptance were established based on the measurement of customer value of the ASP in the case of portable fire extinguishers.