Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments June 16, 2020 erstellt
Beschreibung:
This research explores how customer needs dispersion influences a firm's intent to outsource, and, if the firm does decide to outsource, how it can retain the potential cost advantages offered by a third-party supplier. Customer service plays a crucial role for firms to retain customers and spur revenue growth. It is, however, often outsourced to a third-party supplier, driven by cost savings and ability to focus on core businesses. While there is a large body of literature studying service outsourcing, the dynamic nature of dispersion in customer needs has received sparse attention in the past but is becoming a major concern due to increased market turbulence. This research develops a normative model to explore key drivers that impact service outcomes with heterogeneous and evolving customer needs over time. We find that customer needs dispersion can accelerate a firm's propensity to outsource, and a firm typically benefits from outsourcing, at least initially. Such benefits, however, can dissipate rapidly over time due to knowledge decay with outsourcing; that is, the firm becomes less certain about the underlying customer needs because it is no longer directly involved in service provision. Monitoring efforts can potentially help the firm to arrest the dissipation of the service benefit over time; there exists, however, a threshold of monitoring effort where the benefit of monitoring emerges only if this threshold is surpassed. Hence, a firm is more likely to benefit from outsourcing when an efficient, consistent monitoring effort is implemented over time