Shedding light on the dark side of customer participation: Customer participation stress in financial services

In knowledge intense service settings like financial or legal services, in which the products are highly complex and difficult for laypeople to understand, demands of the participation process may overtax customers in their role as partial employees. Moreover, structural reforms to social security and retirement provisions continue to shift even more responsibility away from governments and companies toward individual consumers. Thus, jointly produced outcomes might be less successful than service providers may expect. Despite a proliferation of research into customer participation, its negative aspects have received little attention, including the extent to which customer participation may be stressful for customers. Research have neither revealed the antecedents nor the outcomes of customer participation stress. However, especially in knowledge intense services, customers might feel overtaxed by service providers’ expectations on their contributions to the service process. We introduce customer participation stress to service research to shed light on both, antecedents and outcomes of this uninvestigated construct.

In a first study we looked especially at the antecedents of participation stress. We surveyed bank customers in Germany and found that employees behavior (e.g. their consulting quality and ambiguous expectations) enhance customers’ participation stress. Furthermore, the results show that customer expertise decrease stress. Investigating the outcomes of participation stress we can approve that customers’ participation stress results in lower levels of customer participation. Thus, organizations who like to promote customer participation in their service process should be aware of and reduce stress-evoking factors within the service encounter. In further studies we will investigate further organizational and behavioral outcomes of customer participation stress and take a look at other services (other than banking) where stress might occur.