Collaborating online: the roles of interactivity and personalization

Abstract

Collaborating with customers is considered a new source of competitive advantage so customer participation and involvement are emerging as key strategic factors. This research studies how interactivity and personalization influence both customers' participation during the online purchase of information services and their intentions to continue participating. It also analyzes whether personalization and interactivity improve customer involvement with the service purchased in online environments. Results verify the importance of interactivity and personalization to foster customer participation, involvement and intentions to continue participating. Moreover, it is found that interactivity moderates the effect of personalization, increasing its influence on service involvement and intentions to participate. This paper demonstrates the convenience of analyzing involvement and participation together in order to understand customer collaboration, as well as the importance of the purchase context from a participation and socialization perspective in the services arena.

Keywords:

• participation
• involvement
• interactivity
• personalization
• information services

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for the constructive comments on this paper. This research is supported by I+D+I project (Ref. ECO2011–23027) from the Government of Spain and the project ‘GENERES’ (Ref: S–09) from the Government of Aragon.