Illuminating the unseen: How and why operational transparency mitigates customer dissatisfaction in platform-based services

Despite increasing consumer demand for transparent service delivery processes in platform-based services, the concept of operational transparency has not received sufficient scholarly attention in the service platform literature. Adopting the concept of operational transparency, which allows customers to observe the details of the service delivery process, our mixed-method research highlights the concept’s prominence in mitigating customer dissatisfaction toward both service platforms and service providers when the service delivery potentially is at risk of falling short. Drawing on signaling theory and equity theory, our research identifies perceived service effort as the key mechanism driving the effect of operational transparency and shows that it operates in a service party specific manner. In line with our theorization, we also showed that the effectiveness of this mechanism is moderated by the presence of service guarantees. These findings offer important contributions to both theory and practice, revealing a promising direction for future research.