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Productivity in Customer Groups during a Service Experience

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Dienstleistungsproduktivität

Zusammenfassung

Services marketing research has increasingly focused on investigating the interactions between companies and its customers in business-to-consumer (B2C) settings. In recent years, scholars have begun to analyse the impact of accidental or occasional customer-to-customer (C2C) contacts on the service experience (Baron et al. 1996; Moore et al. 2005; Huang 2008). It appears, however, that researchers have widely neglected to study the effects of planned joint co-creation efforts of customers in service encounters where multiple customers simultaneously engage in producing and consuming a service experience. During group service encounters the customer’s individual contribution is pivotal to a successful group experience. An uneven balance of customer contributions to the group experience may not be in line with a constant quality assumption (Grönroos/Ojasalo 2004, p. 414) of a manufacturing-based productivity concept, neither on the required input level (customer’s contribution) nor the desired output level, i.e. the individually expected service outcome and the satisfaction with the service.

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Manfred Bruhn Karsten Hadwich

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Finsterwalder, J., Kuppelwieser, V.G. (2011). Productivity in Customer Groups during a Service Experience. In: Bruhn, M., Hadwich, K. (eds) Dienstleistungsproduktivität. Gabler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-8349-6664-3_18

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