Consumer Response to Outsourced 1-800 calls: It’s the Solution Not the Country

Abstract

The growth of call center outsourcing and its emergence as a political and economic issue may have obscured some very important business and consumer issues. Evidence suggests that consumers cannot be satisfied when calls are outsourced (offshored to India for example). The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between where a call is answered and what happened on that call. In this study, call outsourcing is placed within the well understood area of country-of-origin effects. Two experiments were completed in which the outsourced country was manipulated with call outcome (resolution or no resolution of a problem). The findings showed that with no other information presented consumers do have a negative bias (lower expectations of satisfaction) against calls answered offshore. Yet when offshore outsourcing is presented in the context of solution (resolution) there is no negative effect simply because a call was offshored.