ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a model of customer participation performance in service organizations. Customer ability and willingness to perform at least adequately in co-created service can have significant implications for the service provider and for service outcomes. Building on marketing and operations management literature, this chapter offers an integrated overview of a set of practices that services can use to minimize the risk of failure stemming from inadequate customer participation. It is argued that service providers can face the challenges of customer participation by either reducing the participation requirements of the service delivery process and/or by increasing customer attributes that influence their performance, such as motivation, knowledge, and skills. The model rests on a probabilistic conceptualization of customer attributes, whereby attributes are distributed in the population according to some probability distribution that determines the likelihood of failure given service requirements. The proposed set of practices is built to minimize the area under the curve that falls below the threshold point of acceptable performance, thereby reducing the probability of failure.
