Outsourcing is ‘the process of arranging for somebody outside a company to do work or provide goods for that company’ (Oxford Dictionary, 2019) and it has three main advantages including the cheap cost, no full-time employee and the latest development from outsourcing firm (The Economist Magazine, 2008). Currently, worldwide organizations including Thailand have changed their structural foundations by using the outsourcing model. Outsourcing has various type of operation for collaboration companies such as service, IT, finance, logistics or manufacturing. Though there are significant positive impacts for owner and investor of organizations, there are still much negative impacts on the customer, specifically local service by outsourcing. Chakrabortty (2014) states that UK citizens use local public services which are served by third parties in Barnet, and they do not know anything about the local information or area. For example, salary statement for the local council staff member is made in Ireland, library customer services are first routed to Coventry, parking services are handled in Croydon, Benefits of the city are managed in Blackburn, and also deaths, births, and marriages are still organized in other cities. It can be seen that this situation is one of the problems of local services by outside firms who know nothing about local information. This essay suggests that service outsourcing is the cause of the problems for the customers therefore some solutions for service outsourcing must be in the place. The aim of this essay is to analyse the difficulties of service outsourcing and seek solutions to service outsourcing in Thailand.
It has been widely accepted that operation with outside companies has a positive impact. Service outsourcing makes the local customers that have incurred inconvenience situations, especially local service, for local customers. Thailand also has several functions which have been operated by outside companies such as logistic service from Hong Kong, IT service from China or travel platform from Singapore. There are two main problems in service outsourcing in Thailand. Firstly, it is difficultly to communicate with outside service firms who do not know about local information for operation or provide service. To illustrate, the woman who wanted to buy a bench and install it on a local mountain which named as her family’s name as well as that make call centre employee who did not know about either the mountain or how to handle such presents to confuse for serving her (Chakrabortty, 2014). It is obvious that the outside call centre have not had effectively enough to serve the local customer. Secondly, it is quite difficult to contact customer service, which has been managed by the outsourcer. According to Chakrabortty (2014), callers in the local area have to wait in the line all the time, and they have possible opportunity to be thrown off the line by call centre when things get too busy. As can be seen that the residents have awkward contact with the call centre increasingly depend on their quantity of service outsourcing councillors. The local people in Thailand have suffered these problems with their service outsourcing.
There are problems to local customer from service outsourcers. Thus, this essay suggests some solutions to these problems. Firstly, service outsourcing in Thailand has no enough local information to serve Thai customers efficiently. The study of Williams (2017) indicates that positive performance can increase by supporting of locally hired managers because local managers have accumulated local social capital information, which can help them to successfully improve a locally responsive strategy and reduce the negative effects of performance including in the case of China. It is clear that the solution to this problem is hiring which must engage local managers in each vital city in Thailand. The local managers provide the local information to service outsourcing firms for serving high service performance, which is supported by Williams et al. (2017). Secondly, almost service outsourcing in Thailand always busy and the callers also challenging to contact them. The way to improve this problem is a collaboration with another service outsourcing. Reference to Gurvich (2012) reveals that he considered the call centre operated under an overflow mechanism from customers. Callers are first directed to in-house service of service outsourcing. Then, when the waiting room is full, another outside service will open the other stations for callers who do not still gain serving. This solution can reduce the time of customers who access to contact with local customer service by service outsourcing and also decrease the risk of throwing off their line by a call centre in the heavy-traffic period. As can be seen from the report that these solutions can solve the problem of service outsourcing. Service outsourcing in Thailand should apply these solutions to their service organizations for increasing positive service performance.
To sum up, this essay has explored the problems of service outsourcing in Thailand and suggested some solutions to the problems. The problems of service outsourcing include the confusion of service outsourcing serves some services or operations to the local customers in Thailand that causes poorly service performance, the difficulty to contact the customer service which is provided by service outsourcing. And the solutions to improve these problems includes the employment for local managers in Thailand might increase service performance by suggestion from local managers who know local strategy, information and culture in each city of Thailand as well as the collaboration with another outside providers will probably open enough server for serving all customers who want to contact call centre in Thailand. Therefore, service outsourcing in Thailand has some problems while it has some solutions to improve.