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Today's communication landscape affords multiple service interfaces to promote customer engagement (i.e. adherence) with complex and prolonged services, but understanding of how customers use them is limited. This study compares personal and non-personal interfaces that provide educational and/or emotional support for customers to develop the operant resources (i.e. competence and motivation) necessary for adherence. A survey of 270 subscribers to a weight-loss programme demonstrates that booklets and a website (nonpersonal interfaces) provide educational support that enhances role clarity and ability to adhere, respectively. For novices, it is customer forums (personal interface) that afford the educational support needed to develop ability. Group meetings (personal interface) provide emotional support that boosts customer motivation to adhere and, in turn, encourages them to help other customers. Our study distinguishing types of support for adherence, accessed via multiple service interfaces, has implications for management and highlights needs for future research into complex and prolonged services.

It is widely accepted that customers derive value through resource integration, by integrating their own resources with those provided by organization and other network actors. This perspective implies that customers must acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to be effective resource integrators as they engage in activities that facilitate or create value. Supporting customer learning, then, is a pressing new challenge for firms that recognize customers engage in resource integration in the course of their value-creating processes. This article builds on an interactive model of self-directed learning to develop a model of customer learning for resource integration that identifies the characteristics of learning contexts, interactive elements of the learning process and links learning to customers' effectiveness in resource integration activities. A future research agenda is set out, organized around the elements of our conceptualization that can generate much required managerial insights into the interactive process-based nature of customer learning and customers' effectiveness as resource integrators. For practitioners who recognize the resource integration roles customers play, the authors raise a set of questions that will assist in developing marketing programs that support customer learning.