What is customer participation in service what measures would you suggest to enhance customer participation explain?

“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.”

Inhaltsverzeichnis Show

• Introduction
• Section snippets
• Customer participation
• Design and procedure
• General discussion and implications
• Acknowledgements
• Recommended articles (6)
• What is customer participation in service what measures would you suggest to enhance customer participation?
• What is the customer participation in service?
• What are the strategies to enhance customer participation?
• What are the benefits of customer participation in services?

- J.K. Rowling

Research on service failures remains one of the most pressing topics in marketing today, and rightfully so. According to Glasly’s 2018 Customer Service Expectations Survey, 92% of participants mentioned that they would not repurchase from a firm after three or fewer service failures. Among those, 26% would stop purchasing after their first service failure experience (Forbes, 2018). All companies are likely to stumble at some point in time, and even excellent service providers sometimes face service failures. While companies cannot guarantee 100% error-free service delivery, they can ensure that the service failures will be recovered in accordance with customer expectations.

Indeed, early service literature has highlighted the integral role of expectations in customers’ evaluation of service encounters (Zeithaml et al., 1993). Researchers have also emphasized the complexity of expectations of services by customers; for instance, service expectations critically depend on how much customers believe they have been involved in the design of the service and/or the delivery process (i.e., the degree of customer participation) (Dong and Sivakumar, 2017; Zeithaml et al., 1993). For instance, in hospitality and tourism services, it has been shown when customers are more engaged in co-creating services, they are more likely to expect higher service quality (Chathoth et al., 2016). Hence, it can be claimed that customer expectation is particularly critical in service encounters that involve high customer participation. The importance of customer expectations is further amplified when high-participation service encounters fail (Heidenreich et al., 2015; Roggeveen et al., 2012). Despite the inherent significance of customer expectations to service failures in the high-participation service context, there is little research on how customer participation is tied to customer expectation of service recovery, except the recent work by Heidenreich et al. (2015). According to Heidenreich et al. (2015), experiencing a service failure in a high-partcipation (vs. a low-participation) context generates greater negative disconfirmation of expectations. It is possible that after customers sacrifice their time and efforts, including other resources, to contribute in the design and delivery of a service only to find out that the service fails, their expectation of service recovery may be inflated, which negatively influences service outcomes. However, how to mitigate the negative impacts of inflated expectations on service outcomes remains relatively unknown (Heidenreich et al., 2015; Sugathan et al., 2017). In particular, what service recovery strategies can effectively countervail the elevated customer expectation of service recovery and restore service outcomes?

According to recent service research findings, treating customers as passive recipients of service recovery does not allow customers to cope with an augmented sense of control that they naturally desire after a service failure (Guo et al., 2016). On the contrary, engaging customers to participate in service recovery as active contributors provides them with a heightened sense of control (Guo et al., 2016). Extending this line of logic, it is reasonable to inquire if the company should further engage customers to be active participants in service recovery, following a failed, high-participation service provision. Consistent with the service-dominant logic, today's customers try to maximize value by engaging and interacting more with the company at different stages of the process from service delivery to service recovery (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). They act as “active players” rather than “passive audiences” across the entire service chain (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000). Companies are also learning more about customers' wants and needs by collaborating with them to co-create value for these customers, suggesting the importance of participation in the service industry (Chan et al., 2010).

There is more research on successful customer participation than failed customer participation (Dong and Sivakumar, 2017). For example, previous research has found that customer participation can benefit customers by increasing service quality (Xie et al., 2008) and firms by improving operating efficiencies and customer satisfaction (Dong and Sivakumar, 2017). However, as previously discussed, customer participation may act as a double-edged sword when services fail (Heidenreich et al., 2015; Wei et al., 2019). Despite what is known about service failures, critics have argued that minimal knowledge exists regarding customer participation in service failure episodes (namely, co-created service failures) (Park and Ha, 2016; Wei et al., 2019). With a growing number of customers sacrificing more of their time, money, and effort by participating in creating their own service delivery (Chan et al., 2010), greater expectations are ascribed to the company providing service, the experience, and the encounter as a whole (Hess et al., 2003). Inherently, in case of a failed co-created encounter, there is a greater need to understand if customer participation will impede or aid recovery expectations, satisfaction, and service outcomes. Given that more and more companies encourage customers to co-create services and that failures are inevitable, understanding how to regain customer satisfaction and how to create positive behavioral intentions in context to co-created service failure (CCS–F) is vital.

To fill the research gaps, the current study attempts to investigate which service recovery strategy has the greatest impact while recovering CCS-F. Dong et al. (2008) classified service recovery into three types: firm, customer, and joint recovery. Firm recovery happens when customers do not participate and service recovery is solely offered by the firms. In contrast, customer recovery occurs when only customers put in the efforts to fix the problem. In a joint or co-created service recovery (CCS-R), firms collaborate with the customer to complete the recovery process (Dong et al., 2008). Recent service research has started to pay attention to the idea of CCS-R. For example, Hazée et al. (2017) obtained favorable outcomes of CCS-R, such as enhanced repurchase intention. However, the effectiveness of CCS-R is not consistently shown in the literature (Hess et al., 2003). We suspect that one reason is a lack of consideration of customer participation level in the initial service delivery process and the resultant recovery expectations. Thus, unlike previous research studies that either focus on the impacts of customer participation in the initial service delivery (e.g., Heidenreich et al., 2015; Sugathan et al., 2017), or the effects of customer participation during service recovery (e.g., Dong et al., 2008; Park and Ha, 2016; Roggeveen et al., 2012; Xu et al., 2014), our study comprehensively investigates customer participation at both service touch points.

Accordingly, the subsequent questions are asked in this research:

Do customers with higher participation in the initial service delivery have higher expectations for service recovery and as a result, lower satisfaction?

How do different recovery strategies (joint/co-created, firm, and customer recovery) moderate the relationship between service recovery expectation and satisfaction, which in turn influences WOM?

The findings of this research provide significant repercussions for academics and managers alike. First, by collecting data from the same participants before and after offering a service recovery, this study shows how satisfaction and WOM (positive and negative) change when customers have put in time and efforts to participate in the initial service delivery followed by a service failure and then a service recovery is offered to them. Second, by considering the initial customer participation level, this study empirically tests the effectiveness of different service recovery strategies. Thus, practitioners can choose the most appropriate recovery strategy based on how much effort and time, along with other resources, customers have already put in initially to co-create the service.

A scenario-based approach (online hotel booking) was used, which captured co-created service failure and three types of service recovery. Satisfaction and negative and positive WOM were measured after participants were exposed to the scenario-based manipulation. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to assess the model fit and construct validity, and regression analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses.

Customer participation

Customer participation refers to a behavior that involves customers’ extent of providing information and making recommendations in order to become a part of decision making (Chan et al., 2010). In the service context, individuals are not recognized as simple providers of information, but referred to as co-producers who create values along with actual producers (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Vargo and Lusch (2004) define services as “the application of specialized competences (knowledge and skills)

Design and procedure

A scenario-based approach was used due to its benefits over a recall-based method for studying service failure and recovery. For example, asking participants to recall past failure and recovery experiences may enhance “response bias due to memory lapse or rationalization” (Hess et al., 2003, p. 134). In contrast, a scenario-based approach allows the researcher to control “unmanageable variables” such as memory decay and flaws. The service context used in the scenarios is online hotel booking

General discussion and implications

In this research, we have shed light on co-created service recovery (CCS-R), which is under-studied in the service literature. Our research helps advance the dialogue concerning how customers’ satisfaction and intentional behaviors will be when a service failure occurs after customers have actively participated in the initial service delivery. Our findings also reveal interesting insights on the differential effects of different types of service recovery on satisfaction and negative and

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Nwamaka Anaza (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) who greatly assisted us in this research.

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