Study on Customer Participation in New Service Development

Competitive pressures are prompting a new-found aggressiveness that questions established service offering and calls for new ways of identifying and satisfying buyers´ needs. Services involve customers as co-producers. Therefore, it´s necessary to deploy new service development (NSD) considering customer participation. However, it´s still void in academic field. In order to fill this gap, we study on customer participation in NSD in this article. First, we review literature on NSD and customer participation. Then, based on learning curve theory, we come up with a new method to deal with customer participation in NSD. We propose that service firm should collect all the customers´ description needs´ content and its corresponding service firm´s action first. Next, service firm makes cluster analysis of customers´ description needs´ content to gain several main customers´ description needs´ aspects. For every customer´s description needs´ aspect, service firm should describe the relationship between customer degree of satisfaction and service firm´s action. At last, service firm chooses the actions which meet its target service level set beforehand. According to the method, the service firm deploys NSD and continues to make progress based on its experience. Management implications and areas for further research are discussed.