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The performance implications of outsourcing customer support to service providers in emerging versus established economies

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  • Raassens, Néomie
  • Wuyts, Stefan
  • Geyskens, Inge

Abstract

Recent discussions in the business press query the contribution of customer-support outsourcing to firm performance. Despite the controversy surrounding its performance implications, customer-support outsourcing is still on the rise, especially to emerging markets. Against this backdrop, we study under which conditions customer-support outsourcing to providers from emerging versus established economies is more versus less successful. Our performance measure is the stock-market reaction around the outsourcing announcement date. While the stock market reacts, on average, more favorably when customer-support is outsourced to providers located in emerging markets as opposed to established economies, approximately 50% of the outsourcing firms in our sample experience negative abnormal returns. We find that the shareholder-value implications of customer-support outsourcing to emerging versus established economies are contingent on the nature of the customer support that is being outsourced and on the nature of the outsourcing firm. Customer-support outsourcing to emerging markets is less beneficial for services that are characterized by personal customer contact and high knowledge embeddedness than for customer-support services that involve impersonal customer contact and are low on knowledge embeddedness. Firms higher in marketing resource intensity and larger firms benefit more from outsourcing customer-support services to emerging markets than firms lower in marketing resource intensity and smaller firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Raassens, Néomie & Wuyts, Stefan & Geyskens, Inge, 2014. "The performance implications of outsourcing customer support to service providers in emerging versus established economies," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 280-292.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:31:y:2014:i:3:p:280-292
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2014.01.002
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