Delivering customers through service triads

The rise in outsourcing and specialization among firms has led to a supply landscape increasingly based on networks instead of companies (or even supply chains). As such, B2B and B2C now account for the majority of services in developed economies. For example, if a software company outsources its helpdesk services to a third-party call-center, the service interaction is between the customer and the call-center, not between the customer and the software company, even though the customer has a contractual relationship with the software company. Other instances include manufacturers of capital equipment using maintenance service providers to work directly with end-users, as well as many third-party logistics settings. In these examples, the relationships between buying organization, service provider and the buying organization's customer can be viewed as a "service triad", in which the buying organization contracts a provider to deliver services directly to the buyer's customer (Li and Choi, 2009; Niranjan and Metri, 2008), or where the buying organization serves as an intermediary between customers and service providers. Importantly, such service triads entail a structure of inter-organizational relationships that is fundamentally different to linear supply chains. Based on this new stream of literature, we want you to answer the following research questions:

1) Which services can be successfully outsourced?

2) Why do we need to look at service triads? How does this apply to the context of service outsourcing?

3) What are effective interaction patterns in these type of service environments? How to guarantee quality in such an environment?

4) What are interesting future research opportunities in this area? Literature.