Culture and the Impact on Customer Service: Considerations for Offshoring to India

This paper contributes to the discussion about offshoring of customer service functions in international business research. Offshoring and offshore outsourcing have gained popularity mainly because of economics. Many organizations including the McKinsey Global Institute and the Gartner Group have developed checklists for companies to use in deciding if and where to offshore. These lists include the need to consider cost, availability of skills, environment, market potential, risk profile, and quality of infrastructure (Farrell, 2006). The discussion of culture is not prominent in any of the lists. This may not be an issue with functions that do not require customer interaction, but culture has been shown to have an impact on success in doing business globally. A question that companies need to consider is what is the impact of culture on customer service? An examination of the possible impact for offshoring to India is explored and indicates the cultural distance between the United States and India can have an impact on customer service