This document discusses the importance of customer participation in service delivery and outlines strategies for enhancing that participation. It notes that customers play key roles as productive resources, contributors to quality and satisfaction, and sometimes even competitors. When customers do not understand or are unable/unwilling to perform their roles, or when their needs are incompatible, it can widen the service performance gap. The document recommends defining customer roles, recruiting and educating the right customers, rewarding contributions, and managing compatibility to improve participation.

1. Services Marketing
12

2. Customers’ Roles in Service
Delivery
The Importance of Customers in Service Co-creation and
Delivery
Customers’ Roles
Self-Service Technologies—The Ultimate in Customer
Participation
Strategies for Enhancing Customer Participation

3. Objectives for Chapter 12:
Customers’ Roles in Service Delivery
 Illustrate the importance of customers in successful service delivery
and co-creation of service experiences.
 Discuss the variety of roles that service customers play: productive
resources for the organization, contributors to and cocreators of
value, and competitors.
 Explain strategies for involving service customers effectively to
increase satisfaction, quality, value, and productivity.

4. How Customers Widen the Service Performance Gap
Lack of understanding of their roles
Not being willing or able to perform their roles
No rewards for “good performance”
Interference with or from other customers
Incompatible market segments

5. Customer
Participation
across Different
Services (Table
12.1)

6. Importance of
Fellow Customers
in Service Delivery
Other customers can detract from
satisfaction:
 Disruptive behaviors
 Overly demanding behaviors
 Excessive crowding
 Incompatible needs
Other customers can enhance satisfaction:
 Mere presence
 Socialization/friendships
 Roles: assistants, teachers, supporters, mentors

7. Customer Roles in Service Delivery
Productive
Resources
Contributors to
Quality, Satisfaction,
and Value
Competitors

8. Customers as
Productive
Resources
 Customers can be thought of as “partial
employees”
 Contributing effort, time, or other resources to the
production process
 Customer inputs can affect organization’s
productivity
 Key issue:
 Should customers’ roles be expanded? reduced?

9. Customers as Contributors to Service Quality and Satisfaction
Customers can contribute to:
 Their own satisfaction with the service
 By performing their role effectively
 By working with the service provider
 The quality of the service they receive
 By asking questions
 By taking responsibility for their own satisfaction
 By complaining when there is a service failure

10. Customers as Competitors
 Customers may “compete” with the service provider
 “Internal exchange” vs. “external exchange”
 Internal/external decision often based on:
 Expertise capacity
 Resource capacity
 Time capacity
 Economic rewards
 Psychic rewards
 Trust
 Control

11. A Proliferation of Self-Service Technologies
 ATMs
 Pay at the pump
 Airline check-in
 Hotel check-in, out
 Automated car rental
 Blood pressure
machines
 Tax prep software
 Self-checkout
 Online banking
 Online vehicle
registration
 Online auctions
 Home and car buying
online
 Package tracking
 Internet shopping
 IVR phone systems
 Distance education

12. Service Production Continuum (Figure 12.1)

13. Strategies for
Enhancing
Customer
Participation
(Figure 12.2)

14. Strategies for Enhancing Customer Participation
 Define customers’ roles
 Helping oneself
 Helping others
 Promoting the company
 Recruit, educate, and reward customers
 Recruit the right customers
 Educate and train customers to perform effectively
 Reward customers for their contributions
 Avoid negative outcomes of inappropriate customer participation
 Manage the customer mix

15. Compatibility
Management
 “a process of first attracting
homogeneous consumers to the
service environment, then actively
managing both the physical
environment and customer-to-
customer encounters in such a way
as to enhance satisfying encounters
and minimize dissatisfying
encounters” (Martin and Pranter
1989)

16. Characteristics
of Service that
Increase the
Importance of
Compatible
Segments