Multilevel Value Co-Creation Within Key Accounts

Abstract

Optimizing complex service partnerships requires an understanding of multilevel value co-creation processes in a customer-supplier ecosystem. Such strategic business-to-business relationships impact supplier costs and revenues, necessitating dedicated personnel across hierarchical levels to co-create value. The authors study the customer-supplier ecosystem intra-organizationally across firm levels to understand value expectations and orientations, and extra-organizationally to identify supplier harmonization strategies for managing multilevel value co-creation. Empirically, the authors conduct a multilevel-multisource qualitative case study within a strategic partnership, with a service contract valued at over $100 million per year, that includes senior- and frontline-level interviews in the key account customer organization (32 participants) and supplier organization (22 participants). The analysis focuses on how institutions, spanning contracts, and behavioral norms within the business-to-business customer-supplier ecosystem, govern actions and aspirations. Findings typify the nature of divergent value expectations between customer hierarchies along with level-specific co-creation orientations. As future prognosis hinges on harmonizing practices and institutions to address discrepancies in value visibility across customer levels, such an assessment also enables actionable strategies to enhance reengagement. The findings collectively offer theoretical implications for key account management (KAM) research, influencing areas such as professionalization of KAM, effectiveness in KAM, and network dynamics within KAM.