How level of customer participation impacts the service processes

Customer-induced activity vs customer-independent

Customer participation is one of the crucial factors in the service processes. Today various services produce customization through customer involvement in the service creation. The service provider facilitates co-creation by involving customers at multiple touchpoints of service creation and delivery. The degree of participation varies from low to high, and sometimes it’s none if the customers don’t want to participate or don’t possess the skill or knowledge to carry out the activity.

Simplifying further as stated by Sabine Flieb and Micheal Kleinaltenkamp in their paper “Blueprinting the service company managing service processes efficiently,” 2004, the activities can be categorized as customer-induced and customer-independent.

Customer-independent activities are mostly the backstage operations with zero involvement of the customer, for example, in an online order, the packaging and supply chain operations are carried out without any customer involvement. Whereas, the customer-induced activity can vary from passive to active participation of customers in service activities. For example, ordering at a drive through is low/passive involvement than ordering pizza at Pieology where you make your own pizza.

Each type of activities has different impact on shaping the services processes efficiency and also connects to a different kind of risk.

If we increase the number of customer-induced activity in any service.

1. There are more number of contact points between the customer and the supplier.
2. More number of external factors to be considered.
3. Difficult to plan capacity and direct resources to their most efficient use, hence increasing production risk.
4. Low market risk as customer participation means the customer has agreed to accept the service and pay for it.

If we increase the number of customer-independent activity in any service.

1. There are less number of contact points between the customer and the supplier.
2. Difficult to understand the customer interest in the service offering as the customer isn’t the co-producer at any point of the service bundle production, hence increasing market risk.
3. Low production risk as resources use are planned and standardised as per the capacity.

As a designer, we can use this thinking lens while working on our projects.

What if, we see customer journey through this lens and understand what kind of risk is currently married to the service. How we can work towards balancing both types of risk in our designs?

Sometimes the product offerings are shut down due to the cost of production, regardless of the customer liking. How can we designers also help design solutions that balance the internal factors (production, supply chain, etc.) and the external factors (customer demand) at the same time?

I would love to hear your response and thoughts on this, feel free to share and comment.

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Reference: Blueprinting the service company: Managing service processes efficiently, SabineFließ and MichaelKleinaltenkamp, 2004.