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Customer decision‐making uncertainty (DMU) is a persistent phenomenon in business‐to‐business markets. However, there is substantial variation in the degree to which customers perceive DMU and how suppliers should react to it. The purpose of this paper is to explain variation in customer decision‐making uncertainty.

Based on existing industrial buying typologies, this paper proposes a new classification scheme to explain variance in customer decision‐making uncertainty. Market offering complexity and co‐creation are used as defining dimensions in the construction of four archetypal types of industrial market offerings.

The paper demonstrates on a theoretical level that customer decision‐making uncertainty is especially prevalent in complex offerings characterized by high degrees of co‐creation.

This typology helps to provide a more nuanced understanding of the effects of co‐creation on customer value. Firms should adapt their selling approaches to the degree of complexity and co‐creation that they offer their customers.

The originality of the paper rests in explaining customer decision‐making uncertainty in relation to complexity and co‐creation. Thus, it sheds light on the dark side of co‐creating market offerings.

This study aims to identify the key activities after sales and the intended criteria by the customers, considering their expected services after the product purchase process.

This study is a qualitative approach, and the co-creation logic and the Delphi technique were used in two rounds to design and validate the proposed model. To achieve this study’s aims, extensive literature, interviews, interaction and exploratory meetings were reviewed with manufacturers and consumers, and then the dimensions of the proposed model were regulated, corrected and validated in the two-round Delphi technique. The final model is presented after establishing the model in the test pilots and getting feedback from industry experts. To present a conceptual model, the enabler’s logic and the underlying results in the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model were used.

The findings of this study include the identification of dimensions for the after-sales services model and the designing of a conceptual model in both sections of enablers and results. The enabler section of the proposed model includes seven dimensions, three main sectors and four support sections.

This model can be used to design, deploy or improve after-sales services system in manufacturing companies.

For the first time in an innovative procedure, the approach of value co-creation was used to design one of the organizational systems (after-sale services system). On the other hand, the conceptual pattern was proposed inspired by the EFQM Excellence Model, to create the necessary proportionality between the enabler and results sections.