An examination of consumer sentiment toward offshored services

Abstract

This research identifies and analyzes the underlying elements and consequences of consumer sentiment toward offshored services. This is accomplished by initially conceptualizing consumer sentiment toward offshored services, then developing and validating a multidimensional scale (OFFSERVSENT) to measure the construct. This research determines that consumer sentiment toward offshored services is instrumental in explaining consumers' commitment to and global attitudes toward firms that offshore services as well as consumers' word-ofmouth behavior. The strength of these relationships varies depending upon the type of service being offshored. The results of this research contribute to the study of services offshoring, an emerging and fertile area of research for the services and marketing disciplines, and provide practitioners with increased knowledge regarding offshoring decisions.

Employing U.S. Military Families to Provide Business Process Outsourcing Services: A case study of Impact Sourcing and Reshoring

“…Empirical research has shown that outsourcing and offshoring can produce business benefits if client organizations build sourcing capabilities and enact management practices (e.g., Carmel & Tjia, 2005;Choudhury & Sabherwal, 2003). Beyond this economic/managerial view of sourcing are the political and social views that influence sourcing decisions (e.g., Thelen et al, 2010;Heeks & Arun, 2010). Citizens want companies to keep good jobs in their respective domestic borders.…”

“…Additionally, some research has also highlighted the broader negative sentiments against offshoring business services (just as with offshoring manufacturing) and various institutional attempts at prodding organizations to stop offshoring business services in the interest of domestic jobs (e.g., Shao & David, 2007;Thelen, Yoo, & Magnini, 2010;Khan & Lacity, 2014).…”

Offshore outsourcing of customer relationship management: conceptual model and propositions

“…They suggest that while migrating call service centers to offshore locations may be an acceptable strategy for well-known firms, less well-known firms should exercise greater caution in pursuing such a course of action. Summarizing prior research on the topic, Thelen et al (2011) note that front-office offshoring has been found to negatively impact perceived service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Although it is conceivable that CRM outsourcing can enhance a business' customer relationship performance as a result of the specialized CRM skills and infrastructure of third-party vendors, the preponderance of arguments suggest a negative relationship between CRM offshore outsourcing intensity and customer relationship performance.…”

“…Demand-side effects refer to the impact of CRM offshore outsourcing on a firm's customers. For instance, Thelen et al (2011) report that offshoring of front office CRM processes negatively impacts perceived service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. In effect, besides impacting production costs and transaction costs, CRM offshore outsourcing can also potentially impact the quality of service delivery and customer satisfaction.…”

Offshoring and international competitiveness: antecedents of offshoring advanced tasks

“…Although this trend has been the subject of debate in academic journals in the past years, many of its features are still not clear (Kenney et al 2009), and there is a continued demand for empirical evidence and greater theoretical rigor (Bunyaratavej et al 2011). Offshoring is often described in the academic literature as an efficiency-seeking international strategy, in recent years also as a (human) resource-seeking strategy, and offshoring and global sourcing strategies have frequent linkages with marketing and foreign market access strategies (Kotabe 1992(Kotabe , 2001Kotabe et al 2009;Kotabe and Murray 2004), as well as consumer sentiments (Thelen et al 2011).…”