The Dark Side of Customer Co-Creation – What Happens When Technology-Based Co-Created Services Fail?

Abstract

In recent years, technology-based services (TBS) are on the rise. Such services often require an active engagement of the customer within service provision and consumption, which is referred to as customer co-creation. Although the topic of customer co-creation is very popular among researchers and practitioners, extant literature on customer co-creation is still in its infancy. Especially, no one has yet examined customer reactions to service failures within the context of co-created TBS. Thus, the purpose of our paper is to close this research gap by studying the dark side of customer co-creation for TBS. Specifically, we test the mutual influence of service failure and level of customer co-creation on customer satisfaction. Moreover, depending on the level of customer co-creation we examine the effectiveness of different types of service recovery strategies to restore customer satisfaction.