Customer participation in services: domain, scope, and boundaries

Extant service research considers several aspects of customer participation (CP) but lacks a clear and inclusive typology that delineates CP’s domain, scope, or boundaries. To address this gap, the authors build on a review of extant literature and propose a typology to classify CP into three categories—mandatory, replaceable, and voluntary. They demonstrate how this proposed typology improves the conceptual and empirical clarity of CP research. More specifically, the authors (1) suggest using “customer participation” to replace other terminologies such as coproduction and cocreation to reduce confusion; (2) conceptualize CP, customer engagement, and customer innovation as related but distinct concepts; (3) use the proposed typology to extend existing conceptualizations, integrate prior empirical research, and reconcile conflicting findings. Building on the enhanced conceptual clarity, managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.