190 Int. J. Electronic Business, Vol Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. The influence of customer activity on e-service value-in-use Kristina Heinonen Department of Marketing, Hanken School of Economics, P.O. Box 479, FIN 00101 Helsinki, Finland Fax: +358-9-431-33287 E-mail: kristina.heinonen@hanken.fi Abstract: Customer activity in the service process has been argued to be growing. This paper explores how differences in customers’ activity in the service process influence e-service value-in-use. Value is not seen here as delivered to consumers; rather it emerges in the service process when consumers use the service, i.e., value-in-use. Customer activity represents the number of website elements that are used. A four-dimensional model of e-service value is used. The empirical study of an online travel service indicated that the customer activity level positively influenced value-in-use. The paper shows the significance of a value-in-use perspective. Keywords: customer activity; e-service; value-in-use; service-dominant logic. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Heinonen, K. (2009) ‘The influence of customer activity on e-service value-in-use’, Int. J. Electronic Business, Vol. Biographical notes: Kristina Heinonen is Hanken Foundation Assistant Professor at the Department of Marketing at Hanken School of Economics. She is also associate senior researcher at CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management at Hanken. He is currently involved in research projects concerning service value, e-service and mobile service, dynamics of customer relationships, and digital marketing communication. Her work has been published in International Journal of Mobile Communications, Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organisations, Journal of Service Management, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Managing Service Quality, Journal of Financial Services Marketing, Management Decision, and Communications and Strategies. 1 Introduction During the last decade, much has happened in terms of the digitalisation of consumer products and services, and an increasing number of products and services contain some form of technology. Customer participation in the production of both goods and services has been argued to be growing (Bendapudi and Leone, 2003). Traditional self-services such as self-service restaurants are complemented with technology-based processes such as online banking and airline self-service check-in. The recent technology developments have had a significant impact on value creation (Parasuraman and Grewal, 2000),