Understanding Customer Satisfaction in the IT Outsourcing Environment: A Classification of Quality Attributes

Customer satisfaction is important to outsourcing success and hence outsourcing contract continuation. However, with an increasingly competitive environment and a reportedly low success rate, maximizing customer satisfaction naturally tops the challenge chart jar IT outsourcing vendors. This paper describes a research-in-progress that aims at first identifying the factors that influence customer satisfaction and then systematically classifying the factors into five different categories of quality defined in Kano's Theory of Attractive Quality. Once this study is completed, the research findings, specifically the classification, will be a contribution to the body of knowledge in IT outsourcing. The classification will also be valuable to vendors that want to satisfy their customers within the constraint of limited resources.