From value creation to customer experience and engagement: The rail passenger’s perspective

Davies, John Phillip Edward 2024. From value creation to customer experience and engagement: The rail passenger’s perspective. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to develop and test a conceptual model to help understand rail passengers’ behaviour from the customer perspective. Services marketing has focused on the experiential value that emerges positively and negatively for customers during use (i.e. their value-in-use) as they interact with providers (i.e. value co-creation), social actors (i.e. social value co-creation) and resources (i.e. independent value creation). Research has only examined these processes separately but has not examined value creation holistically as a combination of these processes from the customer perspective. This thesis fills the gap by estimating holistic value creation as a novel higher-order construct resulting from these processes, in the customers’ value sphere. Holistic value creation is important as it is useful for examining the construct’s relationships with customer experience, passenger satisfaction, and customer engagement to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the rail passenger’s perspective. To conceptualise passenger’s value creation, the thesis draws predominantly on service logic research and the paradigms value model, but also draws upon research in the paradigms of Service Dominant Logic and Customer Dominant Logic. The integrative model developed and tested in this thesis also advances public transport research. At present, public transport research suggests that supporting passengers’ value creation processes, experiences and service engagement increases satisfaction. However, no study has examined precisely how passengers’ value creation, experiences and engagement relate to passenger satisfaction. The thesis fills this gap by examining the impact of passengers’ holistic value creation and service experience on satisfaction and engagement behaviours. This offers a means of improving passenger satisfaction in Transport for Wales’s rail users. Main data collection was performed between November 2022 and March 2023 through a self-administered survey distributed online to cover a range of rail users throughout Wales and targeted passengers of Transport for Wales, specifically. Overall, a cleaned dataset of 406 respondents was obtained and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the proposed model. The key findings of the thesis are summarised in five key points. Value co-creation contributes most strongly to holistic value creation, followed by social value co-creation and independent value creation. Second, customer experience fully mediates the relationship viii between holistic value creation and passenger satisfaction. Third, passenger satisfaction most strongly relates to the engagement behaviour of advocacy, followed by feedback intentions and future patronage. Fourth, customer experience plays a more important role in the value engagement relationship than satisfaction or holistic value creation. The main theoretical implication of the thesis is as follows. While service logic offers a multi-faceted approach to understanding value creation that can improve a providers’ performance via strategic options, integrating its separate processes offers a more holistic understanding to how customers create value. Customers’ value creation is still a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon, which is empirically shown in this thesis. The novel model, proposed and validated in this thesis, advances the theory and research on rail passenger services by offering a unique customer perspective. This provides a comprehensive understanding of the complexities of passenger behaviour that is useful to researchers and practitioners in rail services and other service contexts.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Funders:	EPSRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 February 2026
Last Modified:	13 Feb 2026 14:18
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179873

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