In order to adapt to the increasingly dynamic and interactive business environment in the era of digital economy, enterprises need to actively guide customers to participate in value co-creation. At the same time, due to the difference of customer engagement capability, only by identifying a small number of participants with strong ability and willingness can enterprises effectively achieve the goal of co-creation. The traditional customer identification and segmentation is the demand identification based on service sales target, and does not consider the particularity of capability identification. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the problem of capability identification in customer engagement. The discussion on this issue is helpful for enterprises to clarify the objectives of customer engagement capability, better integrate and utilize external customer resources, and carry out high-level value co-creation.

The concept of customer capability has different connotations in different research backgrounds, which has not been carefully analyzed by previous scholars. This paper reviews and summarizes the literature on customer capability under the theme of customer engagement capability. On this basis, the identification of customer engagement capability is defined as the process of selecting and determining participants based on customer engagement capability in value co-creation. The reason for paying attention to this kind of recognition lies in that, based on the convenience brought by the Internet business model to the interaction between customers and enterprises, the engagement activities of customers in multiple business links bring customer value beyond the traditional purchase behavior, such as customer recommendation value, customer influence value, customer knowledge value, etc., and the basis of measuring these values is customer engagement capability. Therefore, in order to develop customer value in an all-round way, enterprises must switch from the traditional customer identification for the purpose of transaction to the accurate selection of target customers from the perspective of value co-creation, so as to effectively identify customer engagement capability. Specifically, the objectives of customer engagement capability identification include innovation ability, communication ability, recommendation ability, learning ability and knowledge level. Each kind of ability can bring different types of customer value to enterprises. From the perspective of identification path, the main identification methods can be summarized as result-oriented and process-oriented, focusing on the “performance” of customer engagement and the interactive performance in the process of engagement respectively. The two identification paths have their own characteristics, so we should match the corresponding management resources from the aspects of rules, incentives and resource allocation.

Although scholars have carried out some research in this field, there are still a lot of problems to be further discussed, such as how to expand the scope of recognition based on the growth of recognition capability brought by big data and artificial intelligence, how to develop customer capability considering the dynamic characteristics of capability, and how to identify collective customer capability in the face of the hierarchy of capability. Besides, there are positive and negative effects of customer capability. How to prevent and manage the negative effects such as “value co-destruction” through capability identification is also an important research direction.

In this paper, customer engagement capability is regarded as an important dimension of segmentation, which makes up for the deficiency that customer segmentation only pays attention to customer purchase behavior, but ignores non-purchase behavior, and further expands the application scope of customer segmentation. The differentiation of the concept of customer capability and the induction of the path of capability identification also help to inspire researchers to think and explore the problem of comprehensive development of customer value, and promote the further study of value co-creation.