Foreign or domestic: who provides better customer service?. Issue 2 (13th April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Poddar, Amit; Ozcan, Timucin; Madupalli, Ramana Kumar
• Is Part Of: Journal of services marketing. Volume 29:Issue 2(2015)
• Page Start: 124
• Page End: 136
• Publication Date: 2015-04-13
• Subjects: Service industries -- Periodicals; Customer services -- Periodicals; 658.802
• DOI: 10.1108/JSM-03-2014-0081
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0887-6045

Abstract

<abstract> <title> <x content-type="archive" xml:space="preserve">Abstract</x> </title> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Purpose</title> <p> – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of customer service employees' (CSEs) competence and service recovery outcomes on service evaluations of foreign and domestic CSEs. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Design/methodology/approach</title> <p> – Three experiments were conducted to test and validate the proposed hypotheses. The participants were told a cover story that they were either listening to (Study 2) or reading (Studies 1 and 3) a real conversation between a customer service representative of a bank and a customer and the authors wanted their views about the service encounter. While country of origin (COO) and competency were common independent variables across three studies, Study 2 included service recovery with a full refund and Study 3 had both full and partial refund and apology offered or not. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Findings</title> <p> – Results from three experiments show that while competent CSEs are evaluated the same, regardless of their COO, the domestic CSE is evaluated more negatively than the foreign CSE when both are incompetent. The authors also find that when competent CSEs deliver no service recovery, the foreign CSE evaluations are significantly lower than the domestic one. Study 3 results show that this effect is mediated by participants' ethnocentric beliefs. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Research limitations/implications</title> <p> – For implications, this study provides a deeper understanding of the role of COO in services contexts. Future researchers can utilize the findings to investigate the important role that expectations play in determining service excellence and how it affects the COO effect. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Practical implications</title> <p> – The paper provides managers in both offshoring client and provider firms with an understanding of the effects of offshoring on employee evaluations. It discusses the relevance/irrelevance of COO on the customer evaluations of service employees. </p> </sec> <sec> <title content-type="abstract-heading">Originality/value</title> <p> – The study investigates an under researched phenomenon – offshoring of services. This paper is one of the few looking at the role of different interaction factors, such as competence, recovery on service evaluations.</p> </sec> </abstract>