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The purpose of this study is to provide a unique competitive advantage to businesses in providing a wide range of products to prospective customers. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no study to discuss the impact of customer-centric retailing on total supply chain profit under price competition between organized and unorganized retailers.

This paper considers a supply chain comprising of organized and unorganized retailers and a single manufacturer. This paper proposes three mathematical models considering a customer-centric approach in a competitive environment. Stackelberg game is used to examine how members of the chain interact, and Nash equilibrium was used to find optimal strategies for players under different customer-centric approaches.

The results show that the total supply chain profit is higher when both organized and unorganized retailers use a customer-centric approach independently instead of collaborating process. The result, in addition, establishes that when the dissatisfying cost exceeds a certain threshold (1.5), the total profit is higher for the organized customer-centric effort model compared to the other two models.

The main contribution of the study is to examine the effect of customer-centric retailing, considering dissatisfying costs on supply chains profit and individual decision-making under price competition between organized retailers and unorganized retailers. The authors developed different mathematical models in the different customer-centric approach.

This research aims to profoundly investigate the post-COVID-19's opportunities for customer-centric green supply chain management (GSCM) and perceived customer resilience by studying the correlation between fear-uncertainty of COVID-19, customer-centric GSCM, and the perceived customers' resilience. Moreover, to examine how the perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities moderates the relationship among the variables.

In this study partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was adopted on a sample of 298 managers and customers in the Egyptian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) market for data analysis and hypotheses testing.

Preliminary results indicate that the fear-uncertainty of COVID-19 positively affects customer-centric GSCM. Also, external CSR moderates the association between fear-uncertainty towards COVID-19 and customer-centric GSCM. However, internal CSR does not moderate this relationship. Customer-centric GSCM has a significant positive impact on the perceived environmental and social resilience. However, it has an insignificant effect on the perceived financial resilience. Also, customer-centric GSCM has a significant mediation outcome on the relation between fear-uncertainty of COVID-19 and the perceived environmental and social resilience. However, this relation is insignificant regarding the perceived financial resilience.

Managers could develop a consistent strategy for applying CSR practices, providing clear information and focusing on their procedures to meet their customer needs during COVID-19. Governments and managers should develop a consistent strategy to apply customer-oriented green practices to achieve customers' resilience, especially during the pandemic.

Based on the “social-cognitive,” “stakeholder” and “consumer culture” theories, this study shed light on the optimistic side of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it also brings the concepts of social responsibility, resilience and green practices back into the light, which helps in solving customers' issues and help to achieve their resilience.

This study aims to develop an empathetic and user-centric customer support service design model. Though service design has been a critical research focus for several decades, few studies focus on customer support services. As customer support gains importance as a source of competitive advantage in the present era, this paper aims to contribute to industry and academia by exploring the service design model.

The study adopted a theories-in-use approach to elucidate mental models based on the industry’s best practices. In-depth interviews with 62 professionals led to critical insights into customer service design development, supported by service-dominant logic and theory of mind principles.

The ensuing insights led to a model that connects the antecedents and outcomes of empathetic and user-centric customer service design. The precursors include people, processes and technology, while the results are user experience, service trust and service advocacy. The model also emphasises the significance of the user’s journey and the user service review in the overall service design.

The model developed through this study addresses the critical gap concerning the lack of service design research in customer support services. The key insights from this study contribute to the ongoing research endeavours towards transitioning customer support services from an operational unit to a strategic value-creating function. Future scholars may investigate the applicability of the empathetic user service design across cultures and industries. The new model must be customised using real-time data and analytics across user journey stages.

The empathetic and user-centric design can elevate the customer service function as a significant contributor to the overall customer experience, loyalty and positive word of mouth. Practitioners can adopt the new model to provide superior customer service experiences. This original research was developed through crucial insights from interviews with senior industry professionals.

This research is the original work developed through the key insights from the interview with senior industry professionals.

The motivation for this study comes from decision making related to strategic marketing orientations in international markets. The authors examine if customer orientation and customer relationship orientation perform as two distinct constructs in driving firm innovativeness, and how together they support business growth among export firms. This study aims to suggest a customer-centric strategy for export firms that drive innovativeness and growth.

An international corporation specialized in company information services provided a list of the contact information of Italian companies. The authors sent an email request to respond to an online survey and received 416 effective responses from firms operating in export markets. The authors propose and empirically test a model in which customer orientation, customer relationship orientation and innovativeness predict business growth. This model controls for the effects of firm size, industry and customer type (B2B vs. B2C).

The study findings suggest that customer orientation and customer relationship orientation are two distinct strategic orientations driving innovativeness. However, they do not directly affect business growth. Instead, they require the innovativeness of an exporter to materialize as business growth.

The results of the study recommend business strategies focusing not only on customer needs and satisfaction but also on retaining current customers and building customer relationships in international markets. Firms can learn from international customers and develop effective customer-centric strategies to spread the acquired information into the internal decision-making as it contributes to firm innovativeness and business growth in international markets.

This study is one of the pioneering studies combining customer orientation and customer relationship orientation, showing their theoretical and empirical divergence. This study is also among the first which tests how the two strategic orientations together with innovativeness promote business growth among export firms. The authors add understanding of the synergistic effects both of using customer information and developing deeper relationships on firm innovativeness and performance among exporters.

This paper aims to examine project management segments based on customer satisfaction drivers and loyalty rather than traditional demographic or behavioural variables.

Data were gathered over 18 consecutive months, and 3,129 surveys were completed using a questionnaire. The statistical methods included partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modelling, finite mixture segmentation, prediction-oriented segmentation (PLS-POS) and multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA).

The findings indicate the existence of three segments among system delivery project customers based on the differences in the strengths of the path coefficients in the customer-centric structural model. In Segment 1, satisfaction based on the proposal was crucial for loyalty, with the value-for-money construct negatively impacting the repurchase intent construct. Segment 2 had a solid value-for-money orientation. In Segment 3, the critical path indicated that satisfaction drove repurchase intention, with satisfaction based mainly on the installation.

The research contributes to the segmentation theory by introducing a new way to segment the systems delivery projects customers based on the perceived strength of the relationships in a customer-centric structural model, which aligns with traditional segmentation theory in a way that most segmentation analyses do not. A new segmentation approach to the domain of project management theory is presented. Based on the results, treating the system delivery project customer base as a single homogenous group can lead to managerially misleading conclusions.

The study aims to design a holistic multi-stage hierarchical model that leverages the firm's knowledge-enabled distinctive core competencies (DCCs) and builds enduring and profitable customer relationships to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) in dynamic and challenging environments. It developed a knowledge-enabled customer-centric competitiveness strategy (KCCS) model that integrates four pillars: business process reengineering (BPR), knowledge management (KM), customer relationship management (CRM) and competitiveness strategy. It also proposed a BPR model to enable cross-functional cooperation and coordination for firms dealing with customers, provided a blueprint for KCCS's successful implementation and compared the KCCS model with other customer-centric (CC) approaches.

This study adopted an exploratory research design based on a literature review of relevant studies. It has systematically analyzed 130 articles and books from Scopus, the Web of Science, Google Scholar and other renowned databases from 1982 to 2022. The analysis involved identifying and selecting relevant literature and conducting thematic research to develop a theoretical KCCS model that integrates BPR, KM, CRM, competitiveness strategy and the firm's SCA into a KCCS model.

This study developed an integrative KCCS theoretical model rooted in the extant literature in BPR, KM, CRM, competitiveness strategy, DCCs, SCA and other fields. The study proposed a BPR model as a significant component of KCCS that enables cross-functional cooperation and coordination, which are often troublesome for firms in their dealings with customers. The study also provided a blueprint for successfully implementing the KCCS model and compared the KCCS model with other CC approaches.

This study filled many research gaps in the literature in which knowledge-enabled CC frameworks are widely scattered. It offered a conceptual multi-stage hierarchical KCCS model that combines interrelated elements of BPR, KM, CRM, and competitiveness strategy. It proposed a BPR model as a significant component of the KCCS that enables cross-functional cooperation and coordination, which frequently form barriers when dealing with customers. It also provided a blueprint for successfully implementing the KCCS and compared it with other CC approaches.

This study aims to help uncover corporate culture and values to attract and retain talent by understanding job reviews written by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople.

Over 40,000 job reviews on Glassdoor.com are analyzed by a dictionary-based content analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015), to explore the links between corporate culture and linguistics characteristics of reviews as articulated by B2B salespeople. This study adopted a multidimensional scaling approach based on the nine cultural value scores to create a map of corporate profiles. A projection of the LIWC2015 scores on this map uncovers differences in language patterns and emotions expressed across the profiles.

Findings reveal a map of corporate profiles with two dimensions, namely, product-centricity and customer-centricity, that divide salesforce subculture into a 2 × 2 matrix of four types: Empathic Innovators, Product Pioneers, Customer Champions and Commodity Traders.

This study combined two data sets, scores on CultureX’s nine cultural values (agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance and respect) and job reviews on Glassdoor.com. This research seeks to develop profiles of the organizational culture and to use a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods. This study adds to the literature on salesforce subculture and showcases a solution to the methodological difficulty in categorizing and measuring culture.

This study intends to explore the influence of emotional intelligence on employee self-efficacy in Pakistan's telecom industry. Besides, it explores the mediating effect of emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) between them. This study also tests the relationship between emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) and self-efficacy in the customer care of Pakistan's telecom division.

The study leads forward with a positivist approach to obtain data in two different waves as a time lag study from the big five telecom companies operating in Pakistan. The data was collected from 270 employees working in Customer Services in the Telecom sector.

The results reveal that there exists a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy in customer care employees in Pakistan's telecommunication division sector. Moreover, emotional labor (deep acting) partially mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy, and surface acting could not mediate the relationship among the employees of customer care in Pakistan's telecom division.

Management of emotions at the workplace has been an immensely vital area in managing the performance of employees, especially in customer-centric jobs, where dealing with customers is the prime focus and achieving customer satisfaction is the utmost outcome. There is limited evidence of the relationship between emotional intelligence and self-efficacy specifically in the customer care of the Telecom sector.

The aim of this work is to provide a theoretical model that can help companies to develop a unique approach to achieve both corporate environmental sustainability (CES) and successful customer experience management (CEM).

A two-phase study achieved the research aim. The first phase consisted of the analysis of contemporary theoretical contributions with a focus on CES and CEM. In the second phase, taking a qualitative approach, the key dimensions identified in the initial analysis were investigated to explore the dominant perceptions of practitioners and to hone the theoretical categories.

Five innovative pathways emerged from the study to inform decision-making while maintaining the dual objectives of CES and successful CEM. These pathways are combined to offer a strategic tool for managers and for research advances. This original integrated model also offers six novel theoretical propositions that describe how to shape corporate decisions to achieve environmental sustainability in CEM.

Firms can benefit from an approach that integrates CES and CEM to develop a new mindset for an innovative and valuable decision-making process and to design more captivating experiences for customers. Nevertheless, the efficacy and generalizability of the theoretical framework and propositions require empirical testing.

This paper makes an original contribution to the environmental sustainability and marketing literature by bringing together all elements in these fields of research in a conceptual model. Moreover, this paper proposes theoretical propositions that advance knowledge of the subject and offer ideas for future research and managers.

This research explores the mediating role of a firm's innovativeness and customer orientation on the relationship between commercial success and total quality management (TQM) in the Indian SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) sector.

The hypotheses suggested for this study were validated using partial least squares-based structural equation modeling on data collected from 189 executives working in SaaS companies in India.

The findings of this study revealed that a SaaS company's innovativeness fully mediates the relationship between TQM and corporate performance, whereas the customer orientation of SaaS companies partially mediates the relationship between TQM and corporate performance.

Findings of this paper indicate that, in addition to TQM deployment, SaaS companies' innovativeness and customer-focused strategy will improve their corporate performance. With minimal research focusing on India, this study may be considered a pioneer work. It can serve as a basis for SaaS company promoters to improve their corporate performance by implementing TQM processes.