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Customer engagement (CE) literature features divergent definitions and conceptualizations. To clarify its meaning, antecedents and outcomes, this paper aims to propose that psychological customer engagement (PCE) is the mechanism by which customers’ readiness to engage influences behavioral customer engagement (BCE) in the form of in-role and extra-role behaviors, which then affect customers’ goal attainment, satisfaction and retention.

Set in the fitness center industry, this study combines perceptual data (from customers) and behavioral data (from the fitness center) to reveal a hierarchy of effects: customer readiness to PCE to BCE to customer goal attainment, satisfaction and retention.

Customer readiness variables (role clarity, ability, motivation) influence in-role and extra-role BCE directly and indirectly through PCE. Extra-role BCE is associated with goal attainment and satisfaction, and the latter is linked to customer retention. In-role BCE is associated with goal attainment only.

The proposed integrative model bridges the psychological–behavioral divide in CE literature and encourages the adoption of a broader nomological network that accounts for the effects of customers’ characteristics and actions on their goal attainment, satisfaction and retention.

Managers can enhance CE by improving customer role clarity, ability and motivation. Relative to in-role BCE, extra-role BCE appears more critical because it affects both goal attainment and satisfaction directly and retention indirectly.

The novel integrative approach, combining BCE and PCE in a single model, also provides a consumer-oriented view on CE, which establishes a more comprehensive perspective, as summarized in the proposed model of consumer engagement.

Customer behavior in services is usually perceived as volatile and unpredictable. However, this conceptual paper seeks to demonstrate that for service processes sharing certain common characteristics, one can find similarities in customer behavior patterns. On the basis of the extensive literature review, four types of service processes are identified in a matrix, and it is argued that specific combinations of customer roles and skills within each type of service processes form the basis for customer role and skill trajectories of certain length and structure. Two propositions are suggested at the end of the study to assist the empirical investigation of these trajectories, and some aspects of the problem of collective consumption are addressed.

The shift from product‐focused to customer‐focused organisational structures is motivated by the need to come closer to the problems the customer is trying to solve. This shift and the continuing demand for customer workers presents managers, human resource practitioners and workers with challenges that go beyond the development of customer skills. Customer relationship management is a mix of technical and human capacities. These challenges need addressing if companies are to continue to compete in a service‐based economy.

This paper aims to address the crucial interactions that a start-up enacts with actors from the public sphere in a context of medical technologies. The public actor commonly plays multiple roles, ranging from co-developers and financiers to large-scale users, which are all pivotal to the development and survival of the new venture. The paper investigates the possible “dark sides” of a start-up’s marriage with a public partner, departing from three specific roles the public sphere can assume in relation to a start-up: as a development partner, as a financer and as a customer.

The study builds on an in-depth empirical case study of a Swedish med-tech startup company.

The authors find the financing role to be least problematic, whereas the customer role is the most problematic in that it provides numerous barriers to the possible development and growth of a start-up firm striving to get new customers in a public setting. Examples of the most prominent barriers found are regulations, complex decision-making processes and assessment elements of med-tech products that are outside the control of the startup firm, hence issues that cannot be handled within inter-organizational relationships.

The study builds on 27 in-depth interviews, which were undertaken during 2005-2013, thus contributing detailed data about a start-up’s many and crucial interactions with different public actors. Departing from three different roles, a public partner can adopt in relation to a start-up, (development, co-financer and customer) provides results with managerial implications for start-up’s and policy implications for health-care policy.

Focuses on customer‐to‐customer interaction between strangers. It begins by reviewing the literature in the field and establishing a number of roles that customers may play while participating in this type of interaction. The study then goes on to measure the frequency of interaction and the propensity of 467 garden centre customers to adopt the roles identified by the literature (namely helpseeker and help providers). From analysis of their responses the authors are able to produce typical role scripts associated with each of the roles identified. These will help those interested in managing and facilitating these potentially valuable interactions and give some structure for future research in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that the recasting of supplier and customer roles reconfigures the role of marketing.

A conceptual paper that suggests the need to rethink the role of marketing in the strategic decision making of companies. The study accesses recent theories of marketing, service and value and provides illustrative case examples.

Consumers are progressively more active and the traditional supplier role of controlling consumers is less viable. The case examples show the variety of ways in which companies may adopt a new role in relation to customers and the market. The paper argues that adapting to this role change needs to take place at the highest level in the company and is the way to reinvent marketing strategy. This also necessitates marketing employing unconventional methodologies and relevant theory to address the complexity and ambiguity of current markets.

The paper is a conceptual paper restricted to supplier and customer roles, albeit set in a broader context of stakeholders.

The marketing-oriented supplier of the future can design service systems and exert a certain control at the same time adapting to and supporting consumer initiatives through interaction in networks of stakeholder relationships.

Stressing the new roles of consumers and suppliers; reinventing the role of marketing, breaking with conventional marketing research methodology.

This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework of archetypical customer roles in a self-service-based system by applying role theory to understand customers’ resource integration and value co-creation efforts in practice.

This study is based on a three-phase explorative case study of customers’ experiences of using self-service technologies at a furniture retailer. A total of 90 interviews were conducted.

Four archetypical enacted customer roles during value co-creation in a self-service-based system are identified: passive non-bothered, passive hesitant, active realist and active independent. Furthermore, it is shown that these roles shape how resources become.

The challenges facing our retail practice bear similarities with those in other contexts, e.g. financial and travel industries, government or public sector service settings, in which self-service technologies are becoming more common. Therefore, this study setting enables some tentative generalizations. The case study approach, however, limits the statistical generalizability of the findings.

The importance of understanding is that not all customers are well-equipped for co-creating value through self-service. By engaging customers and offering them guidance when they encounter difficulties in managing the value co-creation process, as well as viewing them as resource integrators and value co-creators, firms can help them enact more active roles.

The archetypical customer roles contribute theoretically to detailing how resource integration and value co-creation can be shaped by enacted roles, an influence that has not been explicitly proposed in empirical service research.

There is considerable research examining the consequences and contingency factors of customer participation in the service encounter. In comparison, there is disproportionately less research examining the antecedents of customer participation. This paper aims to propose and test an appraisal-emotive framework of the effects of front-line employees’ in-role and extra-role behaviours on customer participation.

A survey on 583 customers of retail banks in China has been conducted to test the framework. Structural equation modelling and dominance analysis have been used for hypotheses testing.

Employees’ extra-role behaviour (i.e. organisational citizenship behaviour or OCB) has a stronger effect than their in-role behaviour (i.e. role-prescribed behaviour) in inducing customer participation. These effects are mediated by customer emotions. Specifically, the effect of employees’ in-role behaviour on customer participation was mediated by customers’ positive and negative emotions, whereas the effect of employees’ OCB was mediated by customers’ positive emotions but not by their negative emotions.

The findings reveal that strategic management of employee behaviours can influence customer participation. While organisations often provide training to enhance employees’ in-role behaviour to deliver service performance, they should also recognise and encourage employees’ OCB as a means of increasing customer participation. In particular, employees who display positive emotions tend to evoke positive emotions in customers, which increase customer participation in the service encounter.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies in marketing to examine the differential effects of employees’ in-role and extra-role behaviours on customer participation. Importantly, the findings show that employees’ OCB is not only more effective than employees’ in-role behaviour in influencing customer participation but also these two behaviours have varying effects on customer emotions. These findings are new and contribute to the literatures on customer participation, value co-creation and human resource management.

Research on value co‐creation has gained ground rapidly but remained at a very theoretical level. Thus, it has provided relatively little insight into the nature of individual processes of service provision/value creation, and how firms interact with their customers and contribute to their value creation processes. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to identify and elaborate possible roles firms and their customers enact in the service provision/value creation process.

The research utilizes a multiple case study approach building primarily on qualitative interview data from eight service concepts in the Finnish residential real estate industry.

The research reveals three roles of the firm based on the extent to which firms engage in service provision/value creation processes with their customers. At one extreme, the output of the firms acts as a resource, which is transformed into an outcome and used by the customers. At the other, firms and customers jointly co‐create value, with the firm coordinating the whole offering for the customer. In between, firms transform their resources into relatively standardized outcomes, which customers use in their value creation processes.

The results contribute to the understanding of service provision by categorizing firm‐customer interaction into differing configurations of roles. This reinforces the notion that the depth of interaction affects the extent to which value is co‐created between the firm and customer; different services having different configurations of roles which shape the interaction. Limited to eight service cases, the results only exemplify aggregate role configurations. Moreover, by focusing only on the perspectives of firm representatives, the results do not allow a closer analysis on customer‐specific roles in the value creation process.

This research presents an empirical analysis and interpretation of the service co‐production/value co‐creation process, complementing the extensive theoretical research on the topic. Particularly, the results display different depths of interaction between firms and their customers in co‐producing and co‐creating value, which suggests that it is not necessarily meaningful to consider everything co‐creation from an empirical perspective.

The objective of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with an understanding of the implications and consequences of changes in customer roles and involvement on human resource management (HRM) within a service context.

This paper is conceptual and the approach adopted is analytical. Extant research and concepts have been used to analyse customer roles and customer involvement and their effects on employees. Based on these insights, managerial and research implications are discussed.

The insights from this study provide conceptual support for including customers as a relevant reference and/or extension of HRM beyond the organisational boundaries. Customers can actually significantly influence the success of a company's HRM.

Analysis of the interrelatedness of customer involvement and HRM is limited to services than encompass emotional and communicative aspects. It is argued that an extension of HRM concepts by considering customers' influence provides great potential for future research opportunities.

The paper discusses the contribution of central HRM functions in increasing the customer orientation of employees and companies, reducing role conflicts and role ambiguity, and creating added value for customers. The aspects described here have the potential to contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of HRM and to increase the added value of the HRM function to the organisation.

To date, HRM and customer roles generally have been investigated separately. The analysis of the interrelatedness of these two worlds is likely to trigger and encourage innovative research designs and alternative methodological approaches to new research problems, leading to the added potential of novel research findings with important implications for practice.