Customer participation (CP) refers to customers’ contribution of effort, knowledge, information or other resources to service production and delivery (Dong & Sivakumar, 2017). A key management challenge is to ensure that after customers’ initial acceptance these service formats, customers continue to use them, by the provision and management of CP quality as perceived by the customer. In a CP context, shaping customers’ quality perceptions is complex. First, these perceptions are the result of multiple parties (i.e., customer, employee, and firm). Secondly, customer performance is difficult to control and forms a preeminent source of variability and operational inefficiency (Groth, 2005). Against this backdrop, two research objectives guide this study. First, to propose and test a quality typology that takes a comprehensive view on the CP quality dimensions. Second, to assess whether organizational socialization -consisting of role clarity, self-efficacy, and motivation- is able to influence the customer in service formats that rely on CP. To address these issues survey data were collected from 138 customers. PLS-SEM results indicate that stimulating continued usage of CP formats involves managing an intricate mix of customer quality perceptions (i.e., employee functional and technical quality; firm functional and technical; customer technical quality. In addition, the results show that socialization techniques can be useful to influence customer quality contributions in CP service formats.

• Sandra Streukens(Hasselt University, Belgium)
• Sara Leroi-Werelds(Hasselt University, Belgium)