Cansu Oral

Firms gain a competitive advantage by innovating and creating superior value for their customers. Prior studies revealed that customer orientation affects innovativeness and customer value positively. Customer orientation can either be responsive (RCO) or proactive (PCO). Until now, studies have neglected differences between the antecedents of RCO and PCO. Thus, this paper investigates potential antecedents and their relative impact on PCO and RCO. Results of a survey among 365 managers illustrate that firms should focus on strategy communication, decentralization, customer-oriented leadership, and a customer interaction culture to improve their RCO, while data intelligence and new customer knowledge levers PCO. Firms might either invest in the levers of PCO to foster their innovativeness or in those of RCO to strengthen customer value. Both innovativeness and customer value affect financial performance positively.

In order to create unique customer value and stay competitive also in the long run, customer-centric firms need to develop capabilities to identify relevant trends. The scarce existent research, notably on absorptive capacities, and common management practice suggest that customer interactions and internal cooperation increase future readiness. With data from a cross-industry management survey, we confirm that both factors indeed fully mediate the relationship between customer-centric orientation and future readiness. Multi-group structural equation analyses help to specify how organizational factors impact the creation of future readiness and provide rich managerial implications for resource allocation.

The aim of our study is to create a typology of inbound center quality. An analysis of six cross-industry case studies showed that company strategy and value creation characterise four inbound center types. We then examine drivers of inbound center quality via two experiments with Swiss International Air Lines customers. The findings propose that the quality of response time, communication, and compensation are drivers for customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and repurchase intention. However, voluntary compensations decrease the impact of response time quality and communication quality on customer satisfaction. The experiments highlight differences between 12 experiment groups with moderator effects.