A typology of business usage center members

Repurchase in business-to-business settings is driven by relational outcomes like satisfaction. Recent research suggests that these are mainly determined by the customer perceived value in use, which stems from the customers' experiences within the usage of products and services. This usage usually takes place in multi-actor usage processes, which encompass a multitude of interactions between the users of a focal resource, the members of a business usage center. These users typically perceive the processes and interactions differently depending on their position, responsibilities, expertise, mood, etc. As the actors follow various multiple goals on the individual and collective levels, they perceive the value in use of the same product or service typically differently. Thus, understanding the interactions during organizational usage processes is crucial for grasping the peculiarities of value cocreation in business-to-business usage processes. Hence, we develop a typology of business usage center members through 20 interviews using repertory grid technique and means–end chaining. We elicit five types of users based on 32 characteristics of perceived behaviors in organizational usage processes: Lead, Doer, Soldier, Maven, and Laggard. Furthermore, we show how the characteristics and types influence the actors' value-in-use perceptions and their behaviors toward a focal resource and their co-workers.