How does customer participation support improve customer participation profitability?

International audienceThis papers aims at studying the influence of customer participation support on customer participation. Participation has become a main issue in services with the development of customer’s roles during the experience and the rise of self services technologies. In this context, companies attempt to find out solutions to improve customer participation performance as customer participation support. This paper reviews participation definitions and participation customer participation support definition. Then, it studies the relationship between customer participation support and participation through a quantitative study (570 respondents) in an Ikea store. This paper contributes to define a methodology to study customer participation from a service provider perspective. It proposes to alternate questionnaire and observation phases and to measure participation thanks to robust indicators such as customer participation profitability. When we quickly explain his role to customer at the beginning of the visit, his participation profitability increases. Moreover, the support nature (cognitive vs cognitive + affective) has a stronger influence upon customer participation profitability (CPP) than the support medium (employee vs physical evidences)