The interaction between customer and provider is a crucial locus for marketing. Essentially, it is in the interplay between these actors where value is created or destroyed for the beneficiary—i.e. primarily for the customer but also for the provider. The way in which this interplay is performed will determine the outcome. This notion is recognized in contemporary service and marketing literature, but still not fully reflected in published studies. Rather, the bulk of studies understand service as a perceptual psychological phenomenon, most often focusing on how the customer, and with some exceptions the staff, perceive and experience the service. However, this tradition tends to overlook what is actually done in service interaction, what specific doings and sayings each party use in relation to the other, and what effects that have on the interactants. To advance service marketing research aiming at more in-depth theories of how value is co-created, we argue that focus needs to be broadened, from perspectives of perception and experience to the production–i.e. reciprocal actions in service encounters.

This purpose of this study is to describe how patterns of reciprocity look like in terms of turn-taking activities and by this explain how value is realized, utilizing an empirical study of complex interactions between service providers and customers.

A qualitative single-case methodology was used in order to provide rich descriptions and contextual information relevant for the analysis of reciprocal turn-taking activities in service encounters. Empirical data from mobility service for individuals with physical functional limitations were used. A combination of interviews and observations were conducted with different informants (both customers and drivers), in most cases out in the field on the move travelling from door-to-door in order to grasp contextual information in situ.

The paper identifies a number of social practices of human interaction, some of which are fairly routinized. The latter means that actors alternate between social practices; modify them and iteratively negotiate with the other party in the subsequent steps in interactions. In different phases of these interactions value is created (or destroyed). The study uncovers inherent turn-taking patterns, ranging from ‘simple’ to ‘elaborated’, defined by their character in two dimensions—i.e. substance (the amount of modalities) and interaction (the number of turns). By these two dimensions, we form a classification that describes and explains how value co-creation, in this study measured as well-being, is realized. Theoretically, the study contributes to more fine-grained explanations to the crucial mechanisms that explain value creation and uncover what is hidden in the little prefix "co" in value co-creation. The study also has practical implications as it points to the need to pay more attention to embodied behavioural multimodal sequential aspects during training and education.