Does customer participation improve service quality? The moderating effects of customer expertise

As the market competition goes fiercer, more and more service firms begin to improve their service quality by encouraging customers participating in the service production and delivery process. Although customer participation´s positive value was discussed by many researchers, some recent studies showed inconsistent conclusions which indicated that customer participation increase employee job stress. This paper proposes a concept model that delineates customer expertise´s moderating effect on the relationship between customer participation and service quality. Through a survey of 324 consumers in hairstyle industry, a hierarchical multiple regression was performed to check the model and hypotheses. The results indicate that customer expertise shows positive main effect on service quality as well as positive moderating effect on the relationship between customer participation and service quality.