Co-creating value with customers in online service recovery: Bridging the links between mandatory and voluntary customer participation

Abstract

Enabling customers to participate in online service recovery is crucial for online service providers to realize value co-creation. The existing literature has discussed the significance of customer participation individually in terms of mandatory customer participation (MCP; in-role) and voluntary customer participation (VCP; extra-role). In this study, we adopted basic needs theory to further explore the relationship between these two forms of participation by adopting online service recovery using tourism applications (apps) as the research context. The results indicate that two subdimensions of MCP (physical and mental participation) promote customers’ perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness, resulting in higher online post-recovery satisfaction and VCP intentions (e.g., helping others and recommending). However, the third subdimension of MCP (emotional participation) only positively affects perceived competence. Furthermore, customer-oriented tourism apps can enhance the positive effects of physical and mental participation in terms of satisfying basic needs.