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This research blends perspectives of the Eastern phenomenon of guanxi with the more Western perspectives of relationship marketing and customer centricity. Extending scholarship on guanxi in marketing (e.g. Park and Luo, 2001; Sheu and Hu, 2009; Luo et al., 2008; Fowler and Reisenwitz, 2014), the objective is to highlight the indirect role of customer centricity (i.e. how visible or central it is for the business partner to communicate with/have information sharing with), for firms in regions with a prevalence of guanxi.

The empirical model is tested in context of global marketing in the business-to-business (B2B) logistics industry (n = 508). A total of 508 global logistics employees and managers with experience in global business participated in the survey in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis with multi-group analyses.

Customer centricity intensifies positive outcomes of guanxi prevalence. Specifically, a high level of customer centricity strengthens established associations among guanxi prevalence, trust, relationship commitment and firm performance.

While most work on guanxi has a focus in China, this research focuses on Taiwan. While building on a wealth of literature, relatively less work has focused on customer centricity.

This study aims to assess how employee innovativeness, employee self-efficacy and customer-centricity intervene in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational competitiveness of insurance firms.

This study was a survey, with data collected using a structured questionnaire. The population was the insurance firms in Ghana, and the target respondents were employees. The sample comprises 218 employees drawn from 19 insurers. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling.

This study concludes that transformational leadership had a direct effect on organizational competitiveness. Employee innovativeness partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational competitiveness. Employee self-efficacy moderated the effect of transformational leadership on employee innovativeness. Finally, customer-centricity moderated the effect of employee innovativeness on the organizational competitiveness of insurance firms.

Future studies should pay particular attention to the individual dimensions of transformational leadership (individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence), in combination with the other constructs studied.

Insurance is a service industry, which sells mostly unsolicited products. Customer-centricity is therefore very crucial in achieving organizational competitiveness. Attention should also be paid to transformational leadership and employee self-efficacy, as they enhanced employee innovativeness needed for competitive advantage.

This study contributed to the understanding of the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational competitiveness, by identifying employee innovativeness, employee self-efficacy and customer centricity, as intervening variables.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating effect of a firm’s customer centricity and market orientation on the relationship between the knowledge management and business performance.

The hypotheses proposed for this study were tested on the data collected from 274 sample firms using partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

According to the findings of this study, a firm’s customer-centricity fully mediates the relationship between explicit and tacit knowledge management and a firm’s business performance, whereas a firm’s market orientation partially mediates the relationship between tacit and implicit knowledge management systems and a firm’s business performance.

This study can be considered as a pioneer work that investigates how explicit and tacit knowledge can be transformed into business performance with the mediating effect of a firm’s customer centricity and market orientation on this relationship.

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.

With Sweden and Europe and the present and the future as vantage points, the purpose of this paper is to challenge the viability of customer centricity (or customer orientation) and its axiom, the marketing concept, as the basis for marketing and profitability.

The paper is part of a project in Sweden to stimulate a dialogue on the importance and role of marketing. As such the paper draws on the author's experience as professor, practicing marketer, consumer and citizen and expresses a personal and unorthodox synthesis of ongoing developments in marketing.

Although customer orientation has been on the agenda for at least half a century it is not whole‐heartedly implemented. The reason may be that it is unrealistic as a general guideline for marketing. First, a single stakeholder can only in special instances be treated as the nucleus of marketing and business; a tradeoff between several stakeholders – “balanced centricity” – stands out as more realistic. Second, the gullibility of human nature and the customer's limited knowledge and time open up for the deployment of diverse tricks in marketing practice. The current evolution of marketing theory and the advent of better methodology to handle complexity could be a step forward once the marketing discipline embraces it fully. Gaps between what marketing textbooks prescribe and the real world confronting marketers need to be narrowed.

Just focusing on the customer and customer satisfaction is not possible in practice; businesses have to balance the interests of many stakeholders, thus balanced centricity.

Customer centricity is hardly ever challenged in the research literature and textbooks and its strategic value is often not understood and accepted in practice.

By fusing knowledge-based theory, organizational learning theory and dynamics capability theory, this study aims to explore, on the one hand, the linkage between exploration, sensing and tacit knowledge, and on the other hand, exploitation, seizing and explicit knowledge. Thereby, it argues that not only tacit knowledge but also explicit knowledge contributes to competitive advantage for firms. This study also investigates how knowledge transforms into profitability.

The conceptual model is tested with a study sample of 153 industrial organizations using structural equation modelling.

Results confirm the importance of both tacit and explicit knowledge for achieving sustainable competitive advantages. Furthermore, both tacit and explicit knowledge transform into profitability, both directly and through product innovation and customer centricity which play partial mediating roles.

Explicit knowledge strategies can be easier to manage, implement and institutionalize than tacit knowledge strategies, which require human component and intervention to succeed. Managers should hence first implement explicit knowledge strategies to gain expeditious results. Further, with the advent of digital technologies and algorithms that can extract deep customer insights and organizational experiences which are highly tacit in nature and codifying the same into explicit knowledge, the importance of explicit knowledge is further enlarged.

By fusing three adjacent theories to establish a robust model specification, this study is able to demonstrate the contribution of explicit knowledge in the firm’s competitive advantages.

Customer centricity has evolved into a success factor for many companies, requiring all corporate activities – including business processes – to be aligned with customer needs. With most existing approaches to business process (re-)design focusing on process efficiency, customers are often treated as second-class citizens. Despite emergent research on customer process management, there is a lack of guidance on how to design customer-centric business processes.

The authors conducted a structured literature review and analyzed companies awarded for outstanding customer centricity to compile design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. The authors iteratively validated and refined these heuristics with experts from academia and industry. Finally, the heuristics was grouped according to their expected impact on interaction capabilities to enable their prioritization in specific settings.

The authors proposed 15 expert-approved and literature-backed design heuristics for customer-centric business processes together with real-world examples. The heuristics aim at increasing customer satisfaction with interaction-intensive core processes, which is an important driver of corporate success.

The design heuristics complement existing efficiency-centered (re-)design heuristics. They reflect cognitive shortcuts that support process analysts in the generation of innovative ideas during process (re-)design. The heuristics also add to customer process management and help put customer centricity into practice.

The excessive accumulation of pollutants in the world’s oceans is urging all stakeholders to take swift action. Ecocoast is a Dubai-based organization that makes an impact by carving a niche for itself to overcome this predicament. The organization’s range of sustainable solutions offered at each stage of the coastal and marine development lifecycle focuses on protecting the marine environment. Founded in 2009, Ecocoast has since proven its robust positioning as an industry leader, winning over 15 industry awards. The drivers that influenced Ecocoast’s success were analyzed based on interviews with the founders and employees, as well as secondary data resources. Customer centricity, transformational leadership, research orientation, adaptive culture, corporate transparency, cross-functional specialization, and sustainable corporate thinking were found to be what shaped its success. The case proposes a strategic question for future research: Was it the desire for customer centricity that led to a transformational leadership style, or was it the other way around?

This chapter brings all the key points from each of the earlier chapters together towards a framework for crafting and executing an effective customer experience (CX) strategy. We go back to the ‘how of customer experience management (CEM)’ discussed in the first chapter and connect the dots for the readers through the process and include the common roadblocks and challenges that come in the way to achieve CX results. In this chapter we also link up customer experience to the big ideas of customer centricity and customer engagement. Finally, we discuss the future of customer experience and how CXM/CEM continued to evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims to develop a customer-centric model based on an online customer experience (OCE) construct relating to e-loyalty, e-trust and e-satisfaction, resulting in improved Net Promoter Score for Indian digital banks.

This study used an online survey method to gather data from a sample of 485 digital banking users, from which usable questionnaires were obtained. The obtained data were subjected to thorough analysis using partial least squares structural equation modelling to further investigate the research hypotheses.

The main factors determining digital banks’ OCE were perceived customer centrality, perceived value and perceived usability. Additionally, relevant constructs were evaluated using importance-performance map analysis.

This study used convenience sampling for the urban population using digital banking services; therefore, the outcome may be generalized to a limited extent. To further strengthen digital banking, it would be valuable to imitate studies in other countries.

There is a lack of research on digital banking and OCE in India; thus, this study will help rectify this issue while providing valuable insights. This study differs from others in that it examines the connections between online customer satisfaction, loyalty, trust and the bottom line of financial institutions using these factors as dependent variables instead of traditional measures.