Satisfying different customer groups for IS outsourcing: a Korean IS company’s experience

It is important for an IT service company (IS company) to fully take into account the differences in customer satisfaction across different customer groups. In this article, we consider three layers of customers in the client company. There are project directors who interface with and accept the final product (i.e. IT system) from the IS company, users who actually use the IT system for their daily operations, and finally operators who do maintenance works for the IT system. We propose that each customer group (i.e. project director, user, or operator) evaluates the IT systems success with a different set of criteria. Transaction relationship and partnership turn out to be important determinants for the project directors: task‐related and IS‐related output performances seem to be less influential. The reverse conclusion can be made for users and operators. One additional insight is that IS company’s efforts to understand its customer’s tasks and share risks with the customer company might have unexpected effects. Although the project directors seem to like such close involvement, it can be detrimental to the users’ satisfaction with the IS outsourcing projects.