Communal Service Delivery: How Customers Benefit from Participation in Firm-Hosted Virtual P3 Communities

Question

1. What are the contributions in this paper?

2. What does the author expect the site to engender?

3. What are the main benefits of using customer base for learning?

4. What is the significance of the perception that one has helped oneself?

Accepted Answer

Building upon the social constructivist view on learning and drawing from literature on the firm-customer relationship in services marketing, the authors distinguish between functional and social benefits received by P3 community participants and study in particular the central role of learning in influencing these benefit perceptions.. Based on the results, specific recommendations are provided to marketers interested in implementing service support programs via customer communities, and future research opportunities are explored.

Accepted Answer

The authors expect the site features to engender a sense of community and strengthen the categorization processes that lie at the heart of identification.

Accepted Answer

Companies that leverage their customer base for learning can achieve important performance benefits, such as reducing operating costs and creating added value to customers through increased product quality (Ofek and Sarvary 2001).

Accepted Answer

The perception that one has helped oneself is important from a managerial standpoint as it is likely to be an influential input into assessment of customer satisfaction, and lead to more relational behaviors by the customer.

Accepted Answer

The shared social identity is manifested by the customer categorizing himself or herself as part of the community, valuing this identity positively, and using it to create a shared consciousness.

Accepted Answer

Information accuracy is essential for perceived learning because customers will have less confidence in information that is perceived as inaccurate, and will consequently limit their use of that information (Fuerst and Cheney 1982).

Accepted Answer

The implicit assumption made in current discussions of customer communities is that customers should be allowed to generate content entirely on their own, with employees playing a marginal role, in order to increase the users’ trust in the community and in the firm (e.g., Porter and Donthu 2007; Thompson 2005).

Accepted Answer

Of the participants who fully completed the survey, 50 were randomly chosen to receive € 20 gift certificates to a retail web-site.

Accepted Answer

The context information contributes substantially to the learning experience, as it stimulates effective thinking (Tyre and von Hippel 1997), and supports information prioritization and interpretation (Cramton 2001).

Accepted Answer

Note that because of eBay’s customer contact policies and other scheduled marketing campaigns, reminder message(s) could not be sent to encourage participation from non-respondents.

Accepted Answer

In studies of brand communities, social identification by members is conceptualized to bea central driver of participation (e.g., Algesheimer et al. 2005), and is considered to be an essential condition for a social group to be considered a community (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001).

Accepted Answer

As can be seen, some paths such as the one from ability to customize the site to social identification increased slightly in strength, whereas others such as the path from updated information to learning decreased somewhat strength-wise.

Accepted Answer

The reputation symbol displayed next to a user’s name can be easily used to search for the most trustworthy answers, which should impact learning positively.

Communal Service Delivery: How Customers Benefit from Participation in Firm-Hosted Virtual P3 Communities

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Most frequently asked questions

1. What are the contributions in this paper?

2. What does the author expect the site to engender?

3. What are the main benefits of using customer base for learning?

4. What is the significance of the perception that one has helped oneself?

5. What is the role of social identity in the community?

6. What is the importance of information accuracy for perceived learning?

7. What is the implicit assumption in the current discussion of customer communities?

8. How many people were randomly chosen to receive gift certificates?

9. What is the role of context information in learning?

10. Why did the survey not include a reminder message?

11. What is the role of social identification in the community?

12. What is the effect of the new model on the strength of the path?

13. What is the effect of the reputation symbol on learning?

Figures

Citations

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References

Customer-sales associate retail relationships

An evaluation of incremental fit indices: A clarification of mathematical and empirical properties.

Community and consumption

Clients as “Partial” Employees of Service Organizations: Role Development in Client Participation

Interactions in virtual customer environments: Implications for product support and customer relationship management

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