How to better manage the customer journey in access-based consumption

Findings

• The key specific features of access-based platforms are: temporary access to market offerings, transfer of economic value, internet intermediation, expanded role of the customer who assumes some supply and demand roles, and crowdsourced supply.
• Such platforms struggle to manage the customer journey because of three elements, over which they have limited control:
  • The extended role of customers (“prosumers,” at the nexus of producers and consumers) in the value chain;
  • The interconnected experience of multiple customers, with each customer's actions affecting other customers' experience;
  • The instrumental sociality among customers, with social influences (via reviews for example) shaping and possibly constraining the experiences of some customers more than others.
• Because access-based consumption requires a significant amount of customer work to function effectively, customers, in their role as prosumers, have many opportunities for – largely unpredictable from the platforms' perspective – “job crafting” or making physical and cognitive changes to their tasks.
• The job crafting practices of customers, including stretching the platforms' policies to the extreme, or reconfiguring circulation flows, may allow them to individually avoid pain points, or make their journey “sticky” (more unpredictable and enjoyable). 
• While these job crafting practices may have beneficial collective outcomes (increased exchange value creation for example), they may also disrupt systemic flows by creating delays, reducing the availability of shared products or damaging them.
• To develop journey agility, managers should identify job crafting practices and their impact (disruptive or value-enhancing); they should also encourage positive interdependencies and make them more salient (e.g. send reminders about the date a product is due back) to prevent systemic failures.