Technology-driven mandatory customer participation: a new recovery strategy to promote customers’ online post-recovery satisfaction

E-commerce businesses have been developing new ways of engaging customers in the online service recovery process to realise value co-creation. Such practices have been facilitated by the rapid development of information and communication technology. However, scant research has been conducted on these changes. To bridge this research gap, we explain how the application of technology guides and shapes customers’ responsibilities in online service recovery by constructing the concept of technology-driven mandatory customer participation (MCP), which is a new recovery strategy from the perspective of technology affordance. Moreover, we propose a comprehensive model to explain the influence mechanism of technology-driven MCP on value co-creation. Two sequential studies were then conducted. The first was an initial qualitative study based on interviews with e-commerce practitioners in China, in which three factors of technology-driven MCP (physical, mental, and emotional) and two categories of loss (utilitarian and symbolic) were identified. The second quantitative study explored and validated the relationships between technology-driven MCP, perceived co-creation, experienced burnout, and online post-recovery satisfaction from a loss-aversion perspective. The theory-driven empirical findings provide recommendations for e-commerce businesses to enhance online service management.