A Meta-Design Method for Modeling Customer Value

Customer value, which is the utility of goods and services assessed from the perspective of a customer, is at the core of every healthy organization. As Enterprise Modeling focuses on the systematic modeling and analysis of structures and activities within an organization, it supports the interaction between customer and supplier as a communication and analysis tool of value co-creation. However, existing methods for creating these models require support from scarce model experts to realize concrete model instantiations. This research examines how the modeling of customer value through enterprise models can be made practically applicable in a business context. In this respect, a meta-design modeling method is proposed, which is developed according to a first cycle of the build-and-evaluate loop of the Design Science Research Methodology. The results show that the meta-design modeling method is suitable to model customer value in a business context. However, further improvements can make this method better practically applicable for both domain experts and end-users. In this respect, interesting opportunities for future research are the use of a questionnaire to fill in the front-end models and the integration of the customer value model with, e.g., improvement projects or service management practices.