KOREASCHOLAR

The inseparability, one of service specific characteristics, often makes it necessary and possible for customers to participate in service production and delivery process as partial employees or contributors. As customer participation may enhance or degrade the quality of services and customers’ satisfaction, many researchers have paid much attention to the concept of customer participation. Analogous to the typical classification of service employee behaviors, previous research typically categorized customer participation behaviors into customer participation behaviors and citizenship behaviors. Furthermore, past research showed that both types of customer behaviors significantly affect perceived service quality and satisfaction. However, the many criteria past research has used to classify customer participation behaviors lack conceptual rigor and generalizability beyond the specific types of services for which the criteria have been developed. The lack of conceptual rigor and consistency in classification criteria caused much confusion and incongruencies in empirical findings reported in the current customer participation behavior literature, depending on which specific criteria the researcher choose and on the specific type of service studied. Thus, it is important to develop a classification system of customer participation behaviors which is solid and generalizable to many types of services. This study proposes a customer participation behavior classification system which categorizes customer participation behaviors depending on 1) whether a customer behavior is essential and indispensable in the service production process and/or not and 2) whether a customer behavior is conducted voluntarily or upon requests by service employees. Based on the two criteria, the proposed system identifies five types of customer participation behaviors. Furthermore, this study examines whether the five types of customer participation behaviors affect the two dimensions of perceived service quality - outcome quality and process quality (Grönroos1984) and customers’ satisfaction with service experiences. Data for this study are collected through a survey of adult Korean consumers. Major findings of the study can be summarized as follows. First, increasing the level of each of the five types of customer participation behaviors affects perceived service outcome quality, perceived service process quality, and satisfaction. Second, the relative impact of each type of customer participation behavior varies by the types of participating customer’s personality and depending on whether a service is outcome-oriented or process-oriented type. Finally, the actual impact of each type of participation behaviors on perceived service quality and satisfaction varies according to what customers expect when they perform the behaviors.

• Jungyun Jeong(Hanyang University, ERICA)
• Junyong Kim(Hanyang University, ERICA)