- There is a growing concern about service customers as a way of improving the competitiveness of a service organization. As service customers can be seen as partial employees, customers can exert customer participation behavior toward a service organization. Therefor, a service organization can improve its performance without additional costs. Marketing fields have emphasized the management of customer behavior. However, there have been few empirical researches. To demonstrate the empirically mechanism treating how the participation has an influence on the satisfaction, whose research is overlooked until now, we set the research model to present the performance and expectation as a mediating variable for the participation and to present the kind of service industry as a moderating variable. For measurement of key constructs in this study, we have adopted items from relevant literatures. Nevertheless, I made several amendments for this research context in order to reflect the focal service of the present study(i.e., university education service, medical care service). Respondents consisted of college students with experience related to the education service or medical care service recently. The results show that the model fits the data well and that all of the hypothesis are supported. Empirical results shows that customer participation has significant effect on performance and expectation and the performance and expectation also have significant effect on satisfaction. The findings of the present study show that service manager must manage a service customer actively like his employees and pays attention to customer's perceived performance and expectation. I verified that the performance and expectation can be significantly vary depending on the kind of service. Therefore, service organizations need to understand that the mechanism should be suitable for its service characteristics and at the same time it has to be managed differently to improve the organization's competitiveness. At the end of this paper, implications of the empirical results are discussed and future research directions are offered.







