City Research Online

Abstract

Despite the popularity of access-based platforms, the understanding of customer journeys remains anchored in traditional market contexts that overlook prosumers’ extended value-chain roles, interconnected experiences, and instrumental sociality in access-based consumption. Using a qualitative study on the access-based platform Rent the Runway, the authors discuss the nature of customer journeys in access-based platforms and showcase how customers perform these journeys. The study reveals two key elements: (1) systemic dynamics, which encompass just-in-time circularity and tightly coupled customer interdependencies, and (2) job crafting, which involves customer work practices that allow pain point avoidance, circulation flow adjustments, and journey stickiness increases. Job crafting can create unpredictable disruptions in other customer journeys and affect systemic flows. This investigation expands research on customer experience management and journey design by developing an access-based platform journey model differentiated from ownership- and service-based platform models, showcasing its systemic instability dynamics, and elaborating how to manage these customer journeys.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record will be available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00942-6
Publisher Keywords:	Customer journeys; Access-based consumption; Social interdependencies; Customer work; Job crafting; Sharing economy; Prosumer
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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