The Influence Of Customer Participation On Customer Satisfaction For The Fast-food Industry

Since entering the 21st century, the fast-food industry of China has been developed rapidly. According to statistics, the annual turnover of the fast-food industry of China has already been more than 200 billion RMB, with chain outlets exceeding one million, and developing fast with an annual growth rate of 20%.Recent years, the fast-food industry has been the fastest growing and increasing by a biggest margin hot industry in the domestic consumption market. With the Western fast food such as McDonald's, KFC successfully entering the China market, Chinese fast food encounters impact inevitably, thus, the whole fast-food industry is getting more and more intense. To enhance the competitiveness of fast-food enterprises, customer satisfaction must be improved so that customer loyalty would be built. And the fast-food industry is a typical service industry, therefore, to improve customer satisfaction is one of important factors which increase customer loyalty of the fast-food industry.Although the fast-food industry of China develops quickly, a number of Chinese fast-food enterprises have been established, yet, the current situation is rather gloomy. Taking an overall view of the fast-food industry, what impresses deeply is foreign fast food, such as KFC, McDonald's, etc. The Chinese fast food has generally low customer satisfaction. Due to the characteristic of service, namely, the same time of production and consumption of service, customer participation is inevitable, which has an impact on customer perceived value and customer satisfaction. So, it is very important for the fast-food industry to study how customer participation influences customer satisfaction, which will supply certain management theoretical guidance for fast-food enterprises at cross roads.The domestic and abroad research of customer participation is attracting the enterprises'attention, but the domestic research just gets started. On the basis of literature review, the study finds that the study into customer participation focuses on the relation between customer participation and customer satisfaction, and the industries discussed focus on the industries with moderate-level, high-level customer participation, such as hairdressing. And still, the relation between customer participation and customer perceived quality, customer satisfaction is still controversial. In view of that the study of customer participation is far from mature, the main conclusion is in dispute, domestic research lacks of empirical research, the industries with low-level customer participation are rarely referred, and the future for the fast-food industry is bright but the problems are serious, In particular, issues like low customer satisfaction, therefore, this paper selected fast-food industry as the object of empirical research.In this paper, the background, practical significance, theoretical significance, research goals, innovation points, research methods, research process and contents of this study were first presented. The second part made a literature review on some relevant contents of customer participation. In the part of customer participation, literature review on the definition, extent, motivation, influence factors, the impact on the enterprise and customers participation in the manufacturing sector were made; in the part of customer perceived value, literature review on the definition, classification of concepts, features, models and drivers were made; in the part of customer satisfaction, literature review on the definition, features and models were made. Part three is study design and method, a theoretical model of customer participation and CPV and CS of this study was built on the basis of literature review. Next, the hypothesis of this paper were proposed, finally, the scale was designed, as well as the method of data collection and data analysis were introduced. Data collection on the spot was adopted in this paper, and the valid data would be analyzed with SPSS13.0 and LISREL8.7. Part four is data analysis and model checking. Through the analysis of collected effective data, this study gets the following five conclusions:First of all, there is no significant difference between customers with different genders in the two dimensions of the customer participation, there is no significant difference between customers with different ages in the two dimensions of the customer participation, there is no significant difference between customers with different educational background in the two dimensions of customer participation; and there is no significant difference between customers with different personal monthly income in the dimension of information sharing of customer participation, however, it is significantly different between customers with different personal monthly income in the dimension of cooperative behavior of customer participation. Secondly, customer participation is a multi-dimensional latent variable. In this study, customer participation is divided into two dimensions, namely, information sharing and cooperative behavior. Thirdly, customer participation has a positive effect on the customer perceived value. Namely, information sharing and cooperative behavior influence customer perceived value positively. Fourly, customer participation has a positive effect on customer satisfaction partly. Namely, information sharing influences customer satisfaction negatively, but not significantly; cooperative behavior has a positive effect customer satisfaction. Fifthly, customer perceived value has a positive effect on customer satisfaction. Part five are conclusions of the study, suggestions, research limitations and future prospects.The innovation points of this study are presented as following:First, make a research into the fast-food industry with low-level customer participation. Through empirical research, it can be found that whether the relation between customer participation and customer perceived value and customer satisfaction is the same to that of the industries with moderate-level, high-level customer participation, which is helpful to enrich the theory of customer participation. Customer perceived value was introduced to this paper, rather than the relation between customer participation and customer perceived quality as usual. In this paper, the mainstream theory of second dimensions of Customer Perceived Value was adopted, that is, customer perceived value was measured with customer perceived quality and customer perceived cost. This will enrich the existing mechanism for customer participation to influence customer satisfaction though customer perceived quality, while maintaining the subjective characteristic of customer perception. Study the relation between the various dimensions of customer participation and customer perceived value and customer satisfaction. Basically, the past conclusion is about the relation between customer participation and customer satisfaction, not specific, the study of this paper will make this relation more accurate.Second, develop a scale to measure the impact of customer participation on customer satisfaction for the fast-food industry. This will offer references for certain scholars to design a scale for the low-level customer participation industry. Develop a formula to measure customer satisfaction for the fast-food industry to assess the level of customer satisfaction for some business more conveniently.Third, propose a brand new concept of consumer participation marketing on the basis of empirical study of the fast-food industry. This paper considers that with current social development and technology improvement, it's possible that customers take part in enterprise marketing. Customer participation marketing is that enterprises make customers contribute intellectual, physical or mental participation during design, production or sale of products or services on the real place or with new media such as blog, BBS, SNS, etc. Enterprises and customers create and maximize the value of products or services together.Although taking scientific, professional attitude seriously during the creation of this paper, some limits still exist, advising the further research to enlarge the samples. Meanwhile, this paper proposes directions and suggestions for the future research, hoping that this paper could make some contribution to the development of this theory of customer participation.