서비스 산업에서 고객의 서비스 전달 및 생산과정에의 참여는 필수적인 요소이며, 이러한 고객의 관여는 서비스의 품질 및 가치를 향상시키거나 떨어뜨리기도 하는 것으로 밝혀지고 있다. 현대 산업사회에서 고객들은 기업의 단순한 수혜자의 역할에서 벗어나 공헌자 혹은 공동생산자로서의 역할을 수행하고 있다. 이런 측면에서 고객참여라는 구성개념은 서비스 산업에서 매우 중요하게 다루어질 필요가 있으며, 현재 많은 관심을 받고 있다. 그러나, 고객참여와 관련한 선행연구에서 고객참여와 핵심적으로 관련 있다고 볼 수 있는 고객만족 간의 관계는 불명확하다. 연구자에 따라 서비스 전달 및 생산과정에서의 고객참여의 특정 단계에 속하는 행동만을 고객참여로 고려하거나, 서비스 유형에 따라 연구자마다 제각각의 고객참여의 구성개념을 사용함으로써 고객참여와 고객만족 간의 영향관계는 명확한 결론을 내리기 힘들게 되었다고 볼 수 있다. 본 연구는 서비스의 고객참여를 크게 세 단계로 구성하고 고객참여의 심리적·행동적 특성을 고려하여 선행연구를 토대로 측정문항을 개발하고 이에 대한 타당성을 검토하였다. 4개의 요인을 규명해 내었으며, 그 각각은 적극성, 소통성, 교감성, 순응성으로 명명되었다. 고객참여가 서비스 품질에 기여할 수 있다는 판단과 고객참여라는 행동품질에 의해 서비스의 질이 달라질 수 있음을 감안하여 이 4가지 고객참여의 하위차원을 PARTICQUAL이라 명명하였다. 이러한 고객참여의 구성개념에 대한 확인을 위해 병원서비스라는 특정 서비스 유형을 선정하고 고객참여의 구성개념에 대한 확인과 주요하게 관련되어 있는 접점만족 및 고객만족과의 관계에 대해 확인해 보았다. 그 결과, 병원서비스에서도 PARTICQUAL은 고객참여를 측정할 수 있는 유용한 도구로 확인되었으며, 많은 선행연구들의 결과대로 고객참여는 접점만족과 고객만족에 유의한 긍정적인 영향이 있는 것으로 확인되었다. 이로써, PARTICQUAL은 고객의 서비스 상황에서의 참여 행동 전반에 관한 내용을 담고 있으며, 적극적이거나 필수적이어야 하는 고객참여의 개념을 측정하기에 적합한 것으로 판단된다.
Customer participation in service delivery and production is a necessary element, and it is known that this customer`s involvement improves or degrades service quality and value. It can be said that customers are no longer beneficients, but contributors or co-producers in modern industry society. Considering this point, customer participation construct deserves to be paid much attention and should be dealt with importantly in service industry. However, in previous researches related to customer participation, the path relationship between customer participation and customer satisfaction which has been referred to an important result variable of customer participation is not clear. There are several reasons for this. First, although customer`s different roles have been seen in total customer participation stages, many researchers considered as a customer participation construct only a specific stage of customer participation in service delivery and production. In other words, some researchers regarded only the customer`s effort taken before service delivery as customer participation construct, and some used to consider only the functional service participation as a customer participation construct. It is said that there are no consistent construct of customer participation. Secondly, some researchers took their own constructs of customer participation respectively according to the service types each one chose. In conclusion, since the generalized and basic scale of customer participation was not prepared, it seems that such an important path relationship(customer participation → customer satisfaction or service quality) was unclear. Thus, it is important to develop the measurement of customer participation which can be used to measure the service customer participation behavior totally and consistently. Since customer participation process can be divided into three stages(input, throughput, and output), this study considered customer`s psychological and behavioral constructs related to the customer participation to be dealt with in each stage. Sequently, this study developed the measurement scales which is basic to customer`s psychological and behavioral traits used in previous researches, and confirmed the validity of these scales with various ways. The exploratory factor analysis was first executed and discovered the fact that customer participation was composed of 4 factors. As a next step, first-order confirmatory factor analysis was performed, and then some items were eliminated through this analysis. Now that we found out customer participation has 4 dimensions, we should confirm whether these 4 factors are sub-constructs to consist of customer participation or not. In other words, second-order factor analysis was executed, and we found out the 4 factors addressed for the customer participation. Consequently, the results show that customer participation construct have four factors: activity efforts, communication efforts, sympathy efforts, compliance efforts. Such the scale of customer participation composed of four dimensions was named as PARTICQUAL, which is because customer can contribute service quality, and customer participation can also change service quality. In other words, the principle of naming as PARTICQUAL is that it divides into participation and quality. To check up the usage of this scale, we decided to confirm the nomological validity, which confirms whether the construct can be measured by actually proper measurement or not. It should be examined how the relationship between customer participation and well-known variables related to customer participation is. There are several result variables related to customer participation in previous researches. For example, because customer participation directly influences the encounter interaction with encounter employee, customer`s global positive emotion in service encounter is often referred to the primary result variable of customer participation. Of course, overall customer satisfaction and service quality have been found out as the final result variables as well. So, it can be hypothesized that customer participation explains customer`s encounter satisfaction and overall customer satisfaction. Naturally, it is hypothesized that encounter satisfaction has effect on the customer satisfaction. Additionally, we should choose a specific service type. To check up this scale of customer participation, hospital service was chosen. There are some reasons why we chose the hospital service. First, in hospital service, customer participation level is high. Second, in hospital service, customers experience much face-to-face interaction with a service provider comparing to other service types. Thus, we hypothesize the path that customer encounter satisfaction and customer overall satisfaction are explained by customer participation in hospital service. As a result of nomological validity, it was confirmed that customer participation influenced customer`s encounter satisfaction and overall customer satisfaction significantly. Additionally, as we expected, encounter satisfaction had an effect on overall customer satisfaction significantly. These results show that customer participation scales developed in this study have nomological validity. It was confirmed that PARTICQUAL was useful enough to explain customer participation also in hospital service. The fact that customer participation influences service encounter satisfaction and overall customer satisfaction significantly is the same as the results of previous researches. Therefore, PARTICQUAL is regarded as the proper scales to measure customer participation which should contain customer`s active and essential behavior in service delivery and production, because it contains all the contents and stages of customer behaviors that a customer takes in service settings.