Hizmet sunumunda müşteri katılımı: Marinalar üzerine bir çalışma

Marinas are the most significant element in yacht tourism. They are marine tourism facilities, and they fundamentally provide sheltering for boats, and relevant infrastructure services. With the increase in yachting activities in the world, marinas have gained prominence. Today, marinas are becoming facilities where a wide variety of services such as social life opportunities, shopping, sports and health are offered as well. They create social environments to spend quality time as well as taking the community benefit into account, and contributing to the sustainable development of nearby regions. Satisfying the expectations of customers in marina services, mostly classified as luxury services, is becoming more and more difficult since competition in the sector is rapidly increasing. Thus, marinas now need to cooperate with customers actively, offer customized services according to their needs and demands, and ultimately, establish sustainable and long-term customer relationships. In this respect, it is vital for marina managements to ensure the participation of customers in service delivery transactions in order to stay attractive to the customer, and implement improvements to the offered services when needed. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of customer participation in marina industry, and to reveal the facilitating factors and consequences of customer participation from the yachtsmen's perspective. So as to achieve these aims, a preliminary qualitative and a quantitative research were administered. In the qualitative study, in-depth interviews were conducted with ten marina managers. A semi-structured questionnaire with open-ended questions was employed to facilitate the interview. Content analysis method was applied to the obtained data. This preliminary study explored the meaning of customer participation in marina services, and revealed the possible antecedents and consequences of customer participation in marina industry. Afterwards, a questionnaire including specific constructs such as customer trust, customer self-efficacy, customer participation and customer co-created value was developed based on the results of the qualitative findings. Data was collected from 602 yachtsmen through purposive and snowball sampling, and it was analyzed via Generalized Linear Model (GLM) using SPSS 25. The results demonstrate that almost all intended antecedents including self-efficacy and sub-dimensions of trust (cognitive and affective) have significant and positive impacts on three types of customer participation behaviors in service delivery. Cognitive trusting belief of the customer is the only antecedent that does not significantly influence informational participation. Emotion-based confidence of yachtsmen (affective) strongly affects all types of participative behaviors. Furthermore, their higher self-efficacy beliefs encourage customers to undertake more tasks, and eagerly become a part of co-creation processes. Customer participation behavior significantly influences economic and relational co-created value perception of the customer as well. Additionally, among industry-specific variables which are revealed in the preliminary study, "experience at sea" and "marina region" are the factors that have higher control effects on the relationships investigated in the hypotheses.