Revisiting customer participation in service encounters: Does culture matter?

Service customers expend significant effort through a variety of behaviors, before, during, and after encounters, to increase the likelihood of satisfactory service experience or to salvage failing service encounters. Service customers' satisfaction-seeking behaviors are both proactive and reactive in terms of both intent and execution. These behaviors include preparation, relationship building, information exchange, and intervention. This extension of the original research was presented by Youngdahl and Kellogg [Journal of Operations Management 15 (1997) 19]. It provides an examination of how robust the satisfaction-seeking behaviors are across cultures. The overall question is whether people in different cultures would use similar participative behaviors. We also examined whether or not culture is related to service customers' effort and satisfaction. The counter-intuitive findings indicate that service customers' satisfaction-seeking behaviors are not related to their cultural orientations. Additionally, culture is not related to effort or satisfaction level. The implication is that prescriptions derived from earlier research on these forms of service participation can be applied both across cultures and to any culturally diverse customer base.