Antecedents and consequences of effective customer participation: the role of customer education and service modularity

Purpose: Using multiple theoretical lenses, the paper develops and empirically tests a service design-based framework of effective customer participation (CP) in service delivery. Particularly, the paper examines the impact of customer education on effective CP, besides the latter's effect on service quality. The direct and moderating effect of service modularity on the association between customer education and effective CP is also studied. 

Design/methodology/approach: Covariance-based structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses using the survey data collected from the healthcare industry within Pakistan. 

Findings: The results lend support for the presence of individual and mutually reinforcing effects of customer education and service modularity on effective CP in service delivery, ultimately affecting service quality. 

Research limitations/implications: Building on the CP and customer learning literature, this research extends the work on antecedents and consequences of effective CP in the larger domain of the service design and service delivery literature. 

Practical implications: The findings reveal that service managers should design services such that by design, CP is ingrained within service delivery processes so that it is effectively managed during service delivery for superior service quality. 

Originality/value: Given the already scant research that has either taken a narrower view of CP (mostly in pre- or post-service delivery), the current research makes one of the initial attempts to identify, theorize and empirically test the service design level antecedents for holistic CP spanning over the physical, behavioral and informational participation during the service delivery.