Service Offshoring Fit from Consumers’ Perspective

Abstract

Past research focuses on the location effects in explaining consumers’ responses to service offshoring while the role of service offshoring partners (OSPs)’ characteristics has not yet been addressed. Adapting from information integration and inference theories, this paper develops “service offshoring fit” which is influenced by OSPs’ characteristics and explains the differential responses to service offshoring. Both qualitative and quantitative studies explore the concept of fit and the characteristics of OSPs. The results confirm that corporate reputation of the OSPs and advanced technology owned by the OSPs are the important characteristics that influence service offshoring fit, which in turn affects consumers’ responses to service offshoring. Results also indicate not all the OSPs’ characteristics equally contribute to service offshoring fit but rather be contingent on service types. This study contributes to the current literature as it looks beyond the location effect and explains the differential responses by introducing the concept of fit.

Managing Customer Uncertainty in Making Service Offshoring Decisions

“…OSP characteristics may include overall reputation, location, the technologies employed, facility used, firm size and age, and experience in the industry. Previous research supports that consumers rely on these characteristics to draw inferences about the quality of products or services (Roggeveen, Bharadwaj, and Hoyer 2007) and assess the level of “fit” (Decker and Baade 2016, Lu, Gregory, and Ngo 2020). Our preliminary research results (see Scenario Development section for details) confirm the importance of three key extrinsic cues of OSPs in forming SOF for offshore services: cultural similarity, OSP reputation, and technical capabilities of the OSP as compared with those of focal firms.…”