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The purpose of this paper is to describe the interactions between accounting and marketing activities in a Taiwanese telecommunication firm by demonstrating the dramatic impact that improved costing methods had on the firm’s customer portfolio management activities and consequently on the firm’s bottom line.

The paper presents a case study of a firm in the highly competitive telecommunications industry in Taiwan. The case study was constructed by interviewing key individuals within the organization over an extended period and supplementing those reports with an analysis of internal company documents.

The firm dramatically increased profitability through the integration of activity-based costing into their customer portfolio framework requiring marketing and accounting functions to work closely together. In this rapidly evolving market, cost allocation and customer portfolio management are indispensable. Identifying accurate costs and keeping key customers is a critical issue for the case company. While theoretically the approach is simple, in practice considerable hurdles needed to be overcome.

While considerable literature suggests that customer profitability drives the management of an organization’s customer portfolio, critical to the success of such an endeavor is the accurate calculation and allocation of costs to individual customers. As an interdisciplinary study, this paper provides insights for both accounting and marketing highlighting their reliance on each other in a sound firm. The results of this paper will serve as a supplement to past customer portfolio management research as well as a reference for any firm seeking to enhance their approach to portfolio management.

This study provides a comprehensive framework of adaptation in triadic business relationship settings in the service sector. The framework is based on the industrial network approach (see, e.g., Axelsson & Easton, 1992; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995a). The study describes how adaptations initiate, how they progress, and what the outcomes of these adaptations are. Furthermore, the framework takes into account how adaptations spread in triadic relationship settings. The empirical context is corporate travel management, which is a chain of activities where an industrial enterprise, and its preferred travel agency and service supplier partners combine their resources. The scientific philosophy, on which the knowledge creation is based, is realist ontology. Epistemologically, the study relies on constructionist processes and interpretation. Case studies with in-depth interviews are the main source of data.

Models of value creation that have been proposed for supporting value-based management are described and analyzed, including the Balanced Scorecard, the Baldrige Quality Award Criteria, the Deming Management Method, the Service-Profit Chain, and the Skandia Intellectual Capital Model. These models are compared, their potential for guiding the identification of value drivers and performance measures for value-based management is assessed, and management issues that must be addressed if such models are to contribute to long-run value creation are explored. These issues include causally linking value drivers to each other and to financial outcomes, the extent to which the models take a dynamic, or whole-system, view of value creation, and whether multiple value drivers should be explicitly weighted and combined to form a “value index.” Finally, the substantial body of research evidence linking intangible value drivers to financial outcomes is reviewed, and some directions for further research are offered.

Purpose – This study draws on conflict management literature to examine service recovery by service organizations and its effect on the important marketing outcomes of customer perceptions of service quality (satisfaction, trust, attribution/praise, and value) which influences customer retention rate (loyalty) and thus firm profitability.Design/methodology – Data from 412 banking customers are first employed to test the study’s model, and the results are subsequently cross-validated using a sample of 421 health-care customers.Findings – In services marked by moderate to low customer contact (i.e., task oriented) such as banking, effective conflict management tends to increase customer satisfaction, trust, and perceived customer value. It also has a positive effect on customer loyalty, albeit mediated by the above three variables. However, in high contact service contexts (i.e., personal oriented) like health care, conflict management seems to have relatively weak direct and indirect effects on customer loyalty.Research limitations/implications – The single country (Malaysian) origin of the present study’s data suggests the need for corresponding research in a Western context, where customers likely have different service expectations. Additionally, the research scope could be extended to focus on the relational nature of conflict management (the way in which a conflict is framed and resolved) in service recovery and how this moderates the relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty. The bi-industry approach taken in this research could also be extended to other low- and high-contact service sectors.Practical implications – Service organizations may benefit from training their employees on conflict management, honing skills in sensing and halting potential customer conflicts, and instituting a rapid and procedurally robust conflict resolution mechanism.Value/originality – This research is the first to examine firm’s conflict management across two service sectors. It contributes to theory by situating conflict management at the crux of the service failure/recovery relationship quality debate and underlining its relevance for a range of desired outcomes namely, customer satisfaction, customer trust, customer value attribution or customer praise, and customer loyalty.

The versatility of customer relationship management (CRM) systems has kept these technologies popular over the years. These solutions have been integrated into organizations of all sizes, from large corporations to small- and medium-sized enterprises. Similarly, CRM systems have also found applications in all types of industries and business sectors. All this has been the driving force behind the proliferation of CRM solutions around the world. In this chapter, the author not only reflects on the impact and democratization of CRM systems on business management and marketing strategies but also explores how these technologies can determine the company's income. In particular, the author presents an experiment that analyzes the extent to which the volume of annual investment in CRM solutions can be used to predict annual net income in a sample of companies. Using time series analysis and applying the autoregressive integrated moving average modeling technique, the researcher examines a sample of 10 companies from different industries, and countries, over a 20-year period. The results show the efficiency of the predictive models developed in nine of the 10 companies analyzed. The findings of this study allow us to conclude that there seems to be an association between the investments made in CRM solutions and the income of the companies that invest in these technologies.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.