The role of culture on customer participation in services

Abstract

The major impetus of the research is to understand some of the unanswered questions that surround the construct of customer participation. Customer participation is all about the contributions that are made by the customer in the service process, which ultimately shape the service they receive as well as the quality that is achieved. To date, the amount of literature on this construct is limited but there have been some theories developed and some empirical testing of the construct. However, one of the major setbacks in the extant customer participation research is the lack of a scale to and also lack of focus as to what customer participation is comprised of. This is a prerequisite that needs to be fulfilled if advancement is to be made in the understanding of this phenomenon. The research also attempts to examine the effect of culture on customer participation behaviour, a move that has been called for by academics. This is done through testing of the role of culture in various models. Furthermore, the research aims to investigate possible antecedents and consequences of customer participation behaviour in order to understand not only the immediate construct itself, but also what affects it intensity as well as it effects on other variables in a model of customers' consumption of services. The study has been conducted on two service types, namely tourism and phone banking and data has been collected from three cultural groups, including Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese and British respondents. Work on the scale has demonstrated that it possesses reliability as well as validity and remains promising for future research in other service contexts although there are still improvements that need to be made, most notably being the search for possible additional dimensions of participation. Furthermore, findings from the research signal various important implications for service providers including the use of customer participation as a basis of segmentation, or as an aid in the development of new services or even as a vehicle to change the ways in which individuals interact in the service encounter. This research has served to highlight the importance of this recognised but relatively unexplored construct in services marketing. A first attempt has been made to unveil the properties of customer participation, its antecedents and consequences.