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Top1. Introduction
Nowadays, customer engagement (CE) represents a strategic imperative for generating enhanced corporate performance. According to Gallup (2009), fully engaged customers buy more, retain with a company longer, and are more profitable than rather customers. Moreover, Marketing Science Institute (MSI) located customer engagement in its list of the highest research priorities in 2016-18 (MSI, 2016). Recently, customer engagement considers as one of the concepts that has evolved and reached a leading place in marketing field (Islam & Rahman, 2016). Therefore, it is evident that organizations increasingly consider customer engagement as an important concept for forming their relationship marketing strategies. According to service-dominant logic and social exchange theory, customers are expected to proactively contribute to firm or brand interactions, rather than merely act as passive recipients (Sashi, 2012). According to the two theories, customers are expected to participate in the entire value creation process to firm, rather than merely act as passive recipients (Vargo & Lusch, 2016).
Customer participation (CP) and employee’s innovative behavior (EIB) as marketing concepts can contribute in developing the entire value creation process to firm that lead to increasing the level of customer engagement (Braun, Hadwich & Bruhn, 2017). Furthermore, a few studies argue that customer engagement is affected by various marketing activities (Pansari & Kumar, 2017). In the same manner, service firms are concerned about the possible influence of customer participation on customer behaviors (Li & Hsu, 2018). Despite several studies investigate the effects of customer participation on service performance, little is known about the influence of customer participation may have on a customer’s psychological response (Bendapudi & Leone, 2003; Dong & Sivakumar, 2015) and its role in making customers more engaged with their companies (Chen, 2018).
Additionally, Dong and SivaKumar (2017:960) revealed that there is a need to investigate the linking between CP and CE and integrating customer participation with service systems and institutions. In addition, empirical research that integrates the three concepts: customer engagement, customer participation and employee’s innovative behavior is relatively rare (Bolton 2011; Sharma & Rather, 2016), and very little is known about the role of customer participation and employee innovative behaviour as new marketing concepts in enhancing customer engagement (see Table1).
Table 1. Summary of research results
| Database | Keywords |
| EIB | CE | CP | EIB & CE & CP | EIB & CE & CP & E |
ABI/INFORM
Global
-Scholarly Journals.
*Relevant | 40,165
40,165 | 31,454
31,454 | 56,525
56,525 | 8,657
Non | 277
Non |
Science direct
*Relevant | 24,075
24,075 | 17,988
17,988 | 5
5 | 1,923
Non | 50
Non |
Academic Search Complete – EBSCO
*Relevant | 45
45 | 6,595
6,595 | 674
674 | Non
Non | Non
Non |
Date: 20 December 2019.
*We reviewed and analysed the abstracts of the most relevant articles to our study.
**The Searching Period: from 2000 to 2020.
***CE=Customer engagement, EIB= employee’s innovative behavior, CP= Customer Participation and E= Egypt.