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