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Supply chain strategy of adopting blockchain in post-sale customer care outsourcing in a competitive environment
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Supply chain strategy of adopting blockchain in post-sale customer care outsourcing in a competitive environment

Azmat Ullah, Qingyun Xu, Yi He and Benjamin Lev
International journal of production research, v ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp 1-29
22 Nov 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2022.2146773
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel

Abstract

blockchain technology competitive environment consumers' satisfaction Post-sale customer care supply chain outsourcing
Post-sale customer care (PSCC) outsourcing is an effective supply chain strategy to reduce costs, but traditional outsourcing methods cannot ensure consumers' belief in PSCC quality, harming the firms' competitive strategy. To ensure consumer satisfaction through transparency, this article examines evolving supply chain strategies of leveraging blockchain to outsource PSCC operations of competing manufacturers to third-party agents. Based on consumers' beliefs and blockchain adoption cost, manufacturers have two choices; to outsource the PSCC operations with or without blockchain, resulting in multiple outsourcing strategies. Results show that the consumers' belief in one manufacturer's outsourcing strategy has detrimental effects on the stance of another manufacturer. Moreover, the blockchain cost and consumers' beliefs dictate the manufacturers' strategies for PSCC outsourcing, resulting in a 'quadruple zone of strategic fit', where both manufacturers adopt blockchain or neither adopt blockchain, or one adopts while the other does not. Interestingly, despite the low or zero blockchain cost, both manufacturers will outsource without blockchain if their traditional business models satisfy consumers. The extended analysis reveals contradictory results that manufacturers should outsource more often with blockchain to facilitate consumers when a long-term warranty is offered, or the product has a higher failure rate, even though, overall these factors increase costs.

Metrics

24 Record Views
14 citations in Web of Science
10 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#12 Responsible Consumption & Production

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Engineering, Industrial
Engineering, Manufacturing
Operations Research & Management Science
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