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nt. J. Qualitative Research in Services, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2015 47
Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Customer participation in services: a framework for
process design
Marlene Amorim
University of Aveiro,
Campus Universitário de Santiago,
3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal
Email: mamorim@ua.pt
Philip Moscoso*
IESE Business School, University of Navarra,
Camino del Cerro del Aguila 3,
28023 Madrid, Spain
Email: pmoscoso@iese.edu
*Corresponding author
Alejandro Lago
IESE Business School, University of Navarra,
Avenida Pearson 21, 08034, Barcelona, Spain
Email: alago@iese.edu
Abstract: In any service delivery process its customers participate in a
certain way and how this takes place will affect the efficiency and the
quality of the service delivery process substantially. In this paper we develop a
design-oriented modelling framework that aims to guide managers on the
question of how the participation of customers can be designed best. Building
on a systematic literature review on customer participation models in the
disciplines of services, marketing and operations management, the paper
develops an integrative framework that helps with the assessment of
alternatives design options for customer participation. The framework offers
guidance on the design across the different phases of a service process and
provides a specific set of dimensions to be evaluated in the design. This
supports managers in the examination of the implications of their design for
customer value, as well as for different operational efficiency attributes.
Keywords: SERVQUAL; customer participation; customer value; service
quality; design framework; service process; service design.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Amorim, M., Moscoso, P.
and Lago, A. (2015) ‘Customer participation in services: a framework for
process design’, Int. J. Qualitative Research in Services, Vol. 2, No. 1,
pp.47–61.
Biographical notes: Marlene Amorim is a Professor at the Department of
Economics Management and Industrial Engineering at the University of Aveiro
and the Pro-Rector for International Affairs of the University.
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Philip Moscoso holds the Eurest Chair in Service Excellence at IESE Business
School, University of Navarra.
Alejandro Lago is an Associate Professor in the Department of Operations and
Technology Management at IESE Business School, University of Navarra.
This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘A framework
for assessing the impacts of customer contributions in service delivery’
presented at the 3rd World Conference on Production and Operations
Management, Tokyo, Japan, 5–8 August 2008.
1 Introduction
Customer participation has been identified as a key characteristic of services (Sampson
and Froehle, 2006; Sampson, 2000; Vargo and Lusch, 2004a). Service delivery always
requires some type of interaction with the customer. For example, customers provide
information and feedback and their physical presence is often required. With the advent
of information and self-service technologies – for example, web-based applications,
mobile phones, or ATMs – the number of alternatives that firms can use to interact with
their customers has expanded enormously. Many firms across different service industries
have invested in new technological interfaces to transfer part of the operations to the
customers in order to improve their productivity and service quality (Lee et al., 2009;
Chih-Hung Wang, 2012).
Choosing the appropriate level of customer participation in a service process,
however, can be a challenging decision, which will affect the efficiency of the process
and the quality of the service substantially. Often, transferring some service operations to
the customer reduces costs for the service provider (Mills and Morris, 1986; Bowen,
1986). In service contexts where personalisation is valued positively by the customers,
they may increase customer satisfaction from participating actively in the process, as they
will perceive a higher degree of control over the results (see for the banking sector,
Laukkanen, 2006). Higher levels of customer participation may also bear risks, however.
If customers are asked to perform operations where they are more prone to failure than
employees, for example, this can affect negatively both the operational efficiency and the
service results (Kelley and Davis, 1994).
For managers, the ample range of design alternatives for customer participation
consequently creates very specific challenges. At the more strategic level, it is important
to define business models that favour customer participation where it generates mutual
benefits for both the firm and the customer. At the operational level, it is important to
consider carefully the touch points (i.e., the points of interaction between server and
customer) and choose the appropriate interface technology and mechanisms for managing
customers within the process (Sampson, 2000; Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 2004).
The service literature describes extensively multiple ways in which customers can
participate in service processes (Lovelock and Young, 1979; Mills and Morris, 1986;
Lengnick-Hall, 1996; Bettencourt, 1997; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2000; Prahalad and
Ramaswamy, 2000; Bettencourt et al., 2002; Sampson and Froehle, 2006). Several works
have also characterised qualitatively the impact of customer participation on the
efficiency and the quality of the service delivery (Chase, 1981; Chase and Tansik, 1983;
Customer participation in services 49
Morris and Johnston, 1986; Gummesson, 1994; Mohr and Bitner, 1995; Shostack, 1982;
Grönroos, 1990, 1998; Grönroos and Ojasalo, 2004). There exists also relevant research
on methodologies and tools for mapping and designing process. In traditional operations
management, process mapping – i.e., the careful distinction of activities, inputs, resources
and outcomes – has proven to be very useful for the design and improvement of
manufacturing processes. This process-mapping logic has been progressively
incorporated to the analysis of services processes as well, using concepts such as the
customer corridor (Meyer and Schwager, 2007) or service blueprinting, for example
(e.g., Shostack, 1987; Bitner et al., 2008; Milton and Johnson, 2012). Bitran and Lojo
(1993) distinguished further some generic high level phases of a service delivery process
(e.g., access or execution). Specifically for the analysis of customer co-production from a
marketing angle, Etgar (2008) presents a descriptive model of the consumer
co-production process (e.g., from developing antecedents and motivation for
co-production until generation of outputs and evaluation of process results). Darley et al.
(2010) presents a review of empirical studies dealing with the analysis of online
consumer behaviour and decision-making process.
However, to our knowledge, there is a lack of methodologies and tools that combine
this two areas of customer contribution and process analysis, i.e., that help managers to
systematically analyse and design the customer participation in a given service process.
In this paper, a design-oriented modelling framework is developed to analyse and
design customer participation using a process analysis approach. Within this framework,
we first propose a comprehensive classification of the various types of customer
contributions in service production, according to their purpose in the service process
(they may be inputs or resources of the process). Next, the different types of results of a
service process (the outputs of the process) are analysed. Finally, we evaluate the impact
of customer contributions on different dimensions of process performance. Both the
impacts on service results (customer view) as well as process efficiency (company view)
are considered. The objective is to develop a framework that integrates the existing
qualitative knowledge on the field, for providing a tool that supports systematic analysis
of different design options.
The paper is accordingly organised in three main sections. In Section 2, we review the
extant literature. In Section 3, building on this review, we develop a design-oriented
modelling framework customer participation in service processes. Finally, in Section 4,
we conclude discussing possible future applications of the framework and avenues of
research.
2 Customer participation and services’ performance: a review
The literature about customer participation in service processes is extensive. According to
our focus, we frame the main findings considering the three key aspects of customer
participation that can affect a service process:
1 how can customers contribute to the process, i.e., what are the specific inputs that
customers can provide to a service process
2 how does customer participation impact the customer experience, i.e., how to
evaluate the service performance in terms of customer perceived value
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3 how does customer participation impact the process efficiency, i.e., how to evaluate
service performance in terms of the costs a firm incurs to serve the customers.
To structure the literature review like this (Subsections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3) allows reviewing
stepwise each of the elements that are relevant for the development of the framework we
envision (Section 3). The review started by searching for articles on the topic of
‘customer participation’ within a selection of highest impact journals from the three
disciplines of marketing, services and operations management. This analysis was
complemented by keyword searches using the online resources ISI Web of Science® and
Google ScholarTM. No limit on the year of publications was set, but the searches were
focused to identify journal articles only from the above disciplines. Moreover, only
papers specifically concerned with definitions, antecedents, consequences and the design
of customer participation in the service delivery context were considered for detailed
investigation.
2.1 Customer participation in service production: passive and active customer
roles
Services have been defined as activities which perform a transformation on some input
provided by the customer (Hill, 1977; Lovelock, 1983; Eiglier and Langeard, 1987;
Gadrey, 2000; Zarifian and Gadrey, 2002). These inputs can be very diverse: service
operations can require:
a the presence of the customer himself – as in the case of healthcare or personal
services
b some material or immaterial customer possessions – personal objects to be
transported, cleaned, repaired
c just information (Lovelock and Gummesson, 2004; Sampson and Froehle, 2006).
Consequently, service processes tend to involve a great deal of interaction between the
customers and the service employees. Typically, customers commit some personal time
and effort to reach the providers’ facilities and engage in the service delivery (Lovelock
and Young, 1979; Mills and Margulies, 1980; Chase, 1981; Mills et al., 1983).
During the last decades, customers have been progressively encouraged to perform
more active roles in service production (e.g., supermarkets, gas stations, or more recently
online purchasing). Already long ago some authors have suggested that companies could
use customers to replace the employees in some operations as a source of productivity
gains (Mills and Morris, 1986; Lovelock and Young, 1979). Lengnick-Hall (1996)
established a formal distinction between up – and downstream participation. She
identified three downstream roles: customers acting as buyers, users or incorporating
themselves in the end product; and also coined two upstream roles: when customers act
as resources (they provide contributions which will be integrated into service outputs) or
as co-producers (when customers perform some operations in the service process). Note
that while in the former, customer may contribute only with ‘non-productive’ time (e.g.,
waiting), in the later, customers contribute with elements such as productive time, labour,
or knowledge to facilitate the process (Bettencourt, 1997; Bettencourt et al., 2002;
Lengnick-Hall et al., 2000).
Customer participation in services 51
In their seminal paper introducing the service-dominant logic (SDL), Vargo and
Lusch (2004a) criticised the conceptualisation of customers as resources in the traditional
sense (see also Vargo and Lusch 2004b, 2008). They rather proposed that “the customer
is a co-producer of service” (p.7). Primarily customers are to be considered an operant
resource (i.e., resources that produce an effect by acting on other resources, for example,
know-how), only functioning occasionally as an operand resource (resources on which an
operation is performed to produce an effect, for example, raw materials).
The concept of co-production has been extended to consider customer contributions
in more general instances as well. In the strategic management literature, this is often
referred to as ‘value co-creation’ (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000, 2004). Bettencourt
(1997) introduced a classification that divided customers into promoters of the firm,
co-producers of the service and consultants to the organisation. Building on previous
work, Sampson (2007) defined seven possible types of generic roles a customer can
perform in services: supplier, labour, design engineer, product, inventory, quality
assurance and competitor. While this latter list is quite comprehensive, emphasis has been
placed on analysing the roles where customer can strategically add value, but not so
much on explicitly characterising how these customer roles affect the service delivery
process from an operational point of view.
As a summary, we conclude that customers take increasingly more active roles in
service processes and that the amount and variety of their contributions have expanded
significantly in industrial practice. But customers cannot be just considered operand
resources (in the SDL notation), on which the firm performs actions through the service
process, but rather should be faced as operant resources that want and will have an effect
on their own. We think this already calls for new frameworks in terms of designing
properly customer contributions in a service process. Our paper focuses primarily on
customer contributions during the delivery or execution of service processes, while
contributions regarding the process design or development of new service offerings were
not a primary area of focus.
2.2 Service outputs and customer perceived value
The outputs of a service process are considerably more difficult to specify and evaluate
than those of pure manufacturing processes (Goldstein et al., 2002). First, unlike in
manufacturing processes where the result is a physical product whose quality can be
measured quite objectively, the results obtained in many services can involve intangible
components, which are more difficult to specify and assess (Morris and Johnston, 1986;
Grönroos and Ojasalo, 2004). Second, customers participate in the service process and
consequently, they do not only evaluate the final ‘result’ of the process, but also how the
service was delivered and how good their personal experience was (Morris and Johnston,
1986; Gummesson, 1994; Mohr and Bitner, 1995; Shostack, 1982; Grönroos, 1990;
Grönroos, 1998, Grönroos and Ojasalo, 2004; Heskett et al., 2003; Svensson, 2003). We
will call this dimension ‘process experience’.
The cumulative customer value perception of different service delivery choices in a
process is influenced by the different individual process stages (interactions), as well as
the logical sequence of these (de Ruyter et al., 1997; Danaher and Mattsson, 1994).
Process experiences can be positive when customers enjoy some of the process
participation itself, for example, because of fun elements and socialisation aspects related
to the interaction with other customer or employees (Burke, 2002; Jones, 1999; Holbrook
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and Hirschman, 1982). But it may also be perceived negatively because it will involve
some personal time and effort to reach or contact the service facilities and for completing
the service delivery. Customers may subjectively perceive these personal costs as
inconveniences. In many cases, the process experience can dominate the overall value
perception of the customer and be even more important for the customer than the service
direct results (Grönroos, 1998).
Heskett et al. (1997, 2003) modelled these ideas conceptually with a customer service
value equation, which includes four main aspects. On one side are the two elements
adding value from the customer perspective: service results (the direct outcomes sought
by the customer when purchasing the services) and the process experience (all aspects
related with how the customer experienced the process of delivery). On the other side are
those two elements that detract value from the customer perspective: personal costs
(which include personal expenses, time and effort spend by the customer during the
delivery) and the price paid for the services.
The definition of specific performance measures to evaluate the quality of the service
delivery in each of these value dimensions is complex, however. In addition to the
mentioned intangibility of the outputs, the final customer evaluation will be subjective
and quite heterogeneous, since it will depend on the individual customer preferences and
expectations about the service (Grönroos, 1998; Parasuraman et al., 1985; Zeithaml et al.,
1996). The expectancy-confirmation paradigm (cf., Churchill and Surprenant, 1982)
postulated long ago that a customer’s satisfaction results from the difference between his
initial expectations versus his post-purchase assessment.
The SERVQUAL model by Parasuraman et al. (1985) is probably one of the most
widely accepted models to develop adequate measures of service quality. In line with the
expectancy-confirmation paradigm, SERVQUAL considers service quality a function of
the gap between customer initial expectations and the perceptions derived from the
service delivery experience. The model defines five main dimensions to measure:
tangible elements, reliability (performing the service accurately and consistently),
responsiveness (providing the service fast), assurance (delivering the service in a
competent and credible manner) and empathy (offer care, courtesy and individualised
attention). Several other dimensions have been added later under different labels:
adaptation to customer needs, accessibility (make the access to the service less costly of
the customer) and customer uncertainty.
All these constructs can be combined within the conceptual value model of Heskett
et al. (2003) to develop – as we show in Section 3 – an integrative array of service output
measures that should be helpful to assess the impacts of customer participation in a
service process.
2.3 Impacts of customer contributions on service efficiency
The third aspect of service performance which can be significantly impacted by customer
participation is process efficiency – here broadly defined as all the costs a firm incurs to
serve a given demand of customers with sufficient service quality. On the one hand
service providers may save significant costs by transferring activities to their customers.
On the other hand, however, providers have to invest into building the appropriate
customer interfaces (e.g., technology), or may observe significant reductions in their
service efficiency levels due to a lower productivity of customers comparatively to
employees.
Customer participation in services 53
Chase’s seminal work (1978, 1981) already emphasised the labour intensity of service
processes and suggested that efficiency gains could be achieved by decoupling service
production into two distinct areas: a back-office, grouping all the operations which do not
require a direct presence or interaction with the customer; and a front-office, where all
the processes with customer interaction take place. This decoupling would serve service
processes’ efficiency by enabling the application of process standardisation and labour
substitution principles to the back office operations (Chase, 1981; Metters and Vargas,
2000).
As the focus of service management evolved towards considering customer as
co-producer of the service, it became necessary to address more in detail the implications
of such a strategy. The savings in labour costs that can be achieved by having customers
performing as operant resources (or in traditional view as quasi employees; see Mills and
Morris, 1986; Bowen, 1986) need to be balanced with the costs of effectively integrating
and managing their participation in the production process (managing them occasionally
as operand resources at the same time). Firms have to provide customers with the
adequate means to enable them to execute the required service operations. This can
involve specific technology investments – for example, the investment in self-check-in
technology in airports or retail settings – but also specific process design adjustments,
namely the development of scripts, targeted to support customer tasks in the process
(Bateson, 2002; Cook et al., 2002).
Some authors have further suggested that the design of service processes would
benefit from the application of manufacturing process analysis, monitoring and control
tools (Bitner et al., 2008). Probably best known to these respect are service blueprinting
and business process modelling. Service blueprinting essentially is a representation of the
crucial aspects of a repeatable service process involving many actors (Shostack, 1982,
1987). Blueprinting takes the viewpoint of the customer. Its key features are the customer
actions and the physical evidence that is seen by the customer during the various stages
of service delivery. Actors can be people or other acting resources (e.g., technology).
Business process modelling is a graphical standard to represent the information flow,
decision points and the structure of business processes in a diagrammatic way (Ko et al.,
2009)
In line with such manufacturing inspired modelling approaches, some authors have
studied the impact of customer-induced process variability (Frei, 2006; Xue and Harker,
2002; Larsson and Bowen, 1989). Customer participation can lead to two main types of
variability. First, customers have very heterogeneous capabilities for executing the
service operations (Frei, 2006). Research results have shown, for example, that customers
exhibit important differences in their ability to deal with technology (Venkatesh and
Morris, 2003; Parasuraman, 2000). These differences in customer technology readiness
were found to explain to a great extent the variability in service outputs and value
perceptions across customers. Hence, service providers should address this heterogeneity
with reinforced investments in adequate design and usability of the technology interfaces
(Zeithaml, 2002).
Second, customers can also be very heterogeneous in their motivation for
participating in the service and for assuming more active roles in production (Frei, 2006).
Consequently, providers also face the challenge of properly stimulating customers to
perform some effort to obtain the service. As Mills and Morris observed (Mills and
Morris, 1986), customers do not behave spontaneously as partial employees. On this
regard, Mills et al. (1983) suggested that productivity gains could be realised in services
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by expanding conventional motivation concepts from employees to customers. Their core
argument was that firms should design the interfaces in a way which enables and
encourages customers to perform tasks that were previously done by employees. Similar
arguments were advanced by Kelley et al. (1990) who suggested the use of organisational
socialisation processes as a way for customers to get familiarised with the roles they have
to perform in the service encounter. Socialisation methods that firms can use include
formal socialisation programs, environmental cues and reinforcement and observation of
other customers. Their research results supported that these practices improve customer
expectations accuracy but also create the organisational climate for motivation,
commitment and satisfaction. Similarly, Frei (2006) emphasised the benefits of using
normative approaches, based on customer pride and peer pressure, to motivate the desired
customer behaviour in service operations contexts. The need for managing the customer
variability is crucial, because the mismatch between customer capabilities or motivation
and the chosen customer participation model can have very negative impacts on both the
customer perception of service quality (Kelley et al., 1990), as well as on the process
efficiency.
3 An integrative framework for analysing customer contributions
In this section we present a framework intended to support the design of customer
participation within a service processes. It is an integrative framework, as it is built to a
significant extent upon the analysis of extant literature reviewed in Section 2. In a first
step we specify the key constructs of the framework. Semantics are therefore crucial to
provide a precise terminology and mental conception for these constructs.
Figure 1 An integrated framework for analysing customer participation in services
We define a process as a sequence of activities that perform transformations on some
inputs. The activities are enabled by resources (Anupindi et al., 1999) and the
transformations result in a series of outputs. Process performance must be measured by
the quality of the process outputs on one hand and by the process efficiency on the other.
Accordingly, our framework models customer participation design decisions through
some generic process elements as depicted in Figure 1:
1 customer contributions: a list of possible customer contributions in each of the
process phases distinguishing between inputs or resources to the process
2 service process activities: a mapping of activities required to perform the services,
grouped in main service phases
Customer participation in services 55
3 process performance attributes: a list of the different performance attributes related
to service outputs and customer value; as well as a list of performance attributes
related to service efficiency measures (i.e., cost of the firm).
3.1 Customer contributions
A distinction between customer contributions as process inputs or as process resources is
suggested. Customer inputs refer to the objects that customers provide for being
transformed in the service production process, for example, an object to transport or
repair, information to archive or transfer, or the customer himself in medical service.
Typically the inputs can be distinguished as follows (Sampson and Froehle, 2006):
• The customer himself, when he is required to be present to receive the service (in the
same location or via some communication technology). This would be the cases were
a customer has also an operand resource character in the process.
• Materials or objects, when the service requires some physical transformation of
goods. Typical examples include transportation or maintenance services.
• Information, when service activities handle mainly customer requests about
immaterial objects, such as in communication or banking services.
Customer resources are elements such as time, labour or knowledge, which the customer
commits to the process in order to obtain the service. These resources can be operand or
operant resources in SDL notation, depending on whether the process acts on them or
they act on other resources. These assets can be limited to those required during the
interactions with the provider to inform about the requests and to provide access to
inputs, or be extended when customers assume more active roles in the process and
supply assets to substitute or complement those of the firm. Specifically, we consider:
• labour, when customers play an active role by substituting employees and
contributing with active process time
• technology, when customers commit physical assets to obtain the service; e.g.,
customer’s own car to access a retail store
• know-how, when customers provide intangible assets such as knowledge to
recommend services, feedback for service process control, etc.
Distinguishing between the different forms of customer contribution is important to
assess the impacts on the different dimensions of service performance, as explained later.
3.2 Service process activities
Service processes can be mapped in a set of activities required to deliver the service.
Many different methodologies have been proposed on the literature, which in general
suggest different ways to structure the process phases (Darley et al., 2010; van Dijk et al.
2007; Karmarkar and Apte, 1997; Bitran and Lojo, 1993). The activities required in a
specific situation will be very diverse depending on the service analysed. Following the
widely used approach of Bitran and Lojo (1993), we propose to distinguish some
common ‘high-level’ phases of service delivery to structure the mapping, where specific
activities can be grouped as follows (cf., Bitran and Lojo 1993):
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1 access to the service
2 check-in and diagnostic of customer needs
3 execution of the main service delivery
4 customer exit and finally
5 customer follow-up and feedback, which may include a quality control.
Depending on the service, the logical sequence of these phases may change; some may
occur simultaneously or, eventually, not take place at all.
This clustering of activities in ‘high-level’ phases is useful for several reasons. First,
the degree of costumer participation changes along a service process according to these
phases. Furthermore, some service phases require a minimum level of customer
participation. In particular, in the access and exit phase, some active participation of
customers is always necessary to reach the service facility or the service interface channel
(i.e., phone or web services). In the diagnosis phase, some customer information will
always be necessary to identify customer needs. The company can have different
alternatives to collect that information with more or less customer participation. During
the delivery and quality control, however, companies have much more freedom to decide
the type and degree of customer participation.
A second reason to differentiate these phases is that customer perception of value
may be different in each of them, since the activities performed may affect different
dimensions of perceived value. In particular, during the access phase, the activities
performed (i.e., driving to the hospital or supermarket) increase substantially the
perceived personal cost of the customer but not so much his valuation of the service
quality. In the diagnostic phase, customer participation may not been seen as a burden by
the customer and may also reduce his perception of quality errors in the results. Finally,
during the delivery and follow-up, perceptions may depend on the degree of control by
customers of the final results.
Other tools like blueprinting or business process modelling could be used (see Milton
and Johnson, 2012). Further, the mapping could be extended to other phases of the
service life-cycle, where customers can also contribute substantially to service functions.
For example in service design, customers may often act as consultants, contributing with
labour and know-how. Similarly, in the marketing and sales services, customer may act
as promoters. Finally, after the service delivery, customers may act as agents for service
improvements, either by providing explicit suggestion, or acting as an indirect quality
control for the behaviour of other customers. In each of these phases, the same process
oriented view can be applied to classify customer contributions.
3.3 Process performance attributes
3.3.1 Service outputs and customer value
We shall here define a comprehensive list of service outputs following the analysis
performed in Section 2.2 about the perceived value by customers. We consider the three
main dimensions of Heskett’s et al. (1997) value equation (i.e., excl. price as it per se
cannot be considered as an output, but rather as a decision of the firm) and define within
each of them, specific attributes building significantly on the extended literature derived
from the SERVQUAL model.
Customer participation in services 57
In particular, we consider in the framework:
• Results quality attributes: these attributes capture the evaluation of the service results
by the customer. We consider here two basic aspects: degree of customisation of the
result1, which measures the variety of options offered in the service to fit specific
customer request and the reliability of the results, which measures the capacity of the
process to deliver the expected results by the customer time after time.
• Process quality attributes: we consider three aspects: simplicity (to which extent the
customer finds no difficulties or uncertainty to navigate through the process; that is
what some authors have coined as process control) and fun (or enjoyment; to which
extend the customer perceives a positive value of undergoing the experience due to
aspects related to pleasant personal experiences, need of socialisation, empathy with
employees…).
• Personal cost attributes: we include any kind of inconveniences customers
experience as a consequence of the resources they commit to obtain the service, such
as personal time and effort devoted to the process, but without distinguishing further
on.
3.3.2 Operational efficiency attributes
Building on our literature analysis in Section 2.3, we consider a separate set of
performance attributes to assess the impacts of customer participation on the operational
efficiency of the process. In particular,
• labour costs: these may include an increase or reduction in labour (or other variable
expenses) the company may experience as a result of customer participation
• asset intensity: these may include an increase or reduction of the investments in
technology or working assets (e.g., inventories) the company may need to
accommodate customer participation.
4 Discussion and contributions
Design-oriented frameworks are intended to facilitate designers’ reasoning about possible
solutions to particular design problems. In this paper we have presented such a
framework for the design of customer participation in services processes using a process
mapping approach. In this context the proposed framework aims to be:
1 a managerial tool for informing the decisions about alternative service process
designs, with regards to customer participation
2 a building block for conducting systematic research on the performance impacts of
customer participation models across different service industries and customer
segments.
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4.1 Managerial implications
The complexity of designing customer contributions in service processes, as well as the
particularities of each individual design situation, have motivated us to develop a
framework which is rather descriptive than normative. It will therefore lead managers not
to a single straightforward design solution, but rather will support the analysis of different
design options and reflection on design decisions. Moreover, we think that in general
there is not something as a perfect design, but tradeoffs will exist and certain design
options will be preferred for certain customer segments and service contexts.
The framework takes into consideration both the different types of possible customer
contributions as well as different types of performance measures. In terms of customer
contributions managers need to clearly differentiate between customers providing inputs
or resources. Further, the application of the framework explicitly demonstrated how the
nature of costumer contributions can vary significantly across the different phases of a
service process (e.g., access or execution) and how different levels of customer
participation can impact differently on the various performance measures. The
heterogeneity of these performance impacts is likely to be further reinforced across
different customer segments and service industries, as well as by an increasing number of
technological service interfaces.
4.2 Future research
We can think of two main avenues of future research. A first one would address the
relation between alternative design strategies for customer participation and different
service typologies. This could be done using a service classification as suggested by
Schmenner (2004). The research could support the development of guidelines for
designing service business models with adequate customer participation for each service
business type. In order to make the framework more user-friendly to practitioners and
researchers, the aim of a second stream of research should be to integrate the framework
operationally into a design methodology (i.e., a toolbox). Such a methodology focused on
the design of customer contributions, could be then integrated in to a more general
service process design approach. To do that, further in-depth case studies should
examine, among other things, the methodological principles to be made explicit in
instructions for facilitating the use of the framework. It is a fact that our research was
very exploratory and the primary information source has been extant literature. These
additional practical validations should allow identifying opportunities for improving
further the framework and its parameterisation.
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