Outsourcing is a very important issue in management these days. In particular, IT outsourcing is regarded the most critical one, thanks to the enhanced market need for highly sophisticated IT services and an emphasis on the core competence of a company: in order to focus on what it can do best, the company usually outsources its IT services outside.
For the companies providing IT services, the issue of how to better satisfy customers is more relevant. Although research on customer satisfaction in IT outsourcing abounds, few researchers have looked into the effect of different customer types on the overall customer satisfaction with the IT outsourcing.
In this research, we consider three different types of customer involved in the IT outsourcing: top management (or project director), users, and operator at the customer company. We analyze the survey data conducted for the three types of customers at the client companies.
Our research model consists of four constructs: customer's IT outsourcing satisfaction (the dependent variable), relational transaction characteristics, partnership characteristics, and product/service characteristics (independent variables). We propose that the IT outsourcing satisfaction is determined by the three sets of constructs, but that the specific relationship between dependent and independent variables might differ according to the customer type in point.
The statistical analysis of the survey data partially confirms our propositions. That is, we could find statistically significant differences among customer types for some of the factors. We infer that the IT service companies need to take into account the potential conflict among the customer types when designing an IT service providing strategy.
