1st Edition
Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management Business-to-Business Customer Loyalty Analysis
Many business-to-business (B2B) managers think that customers act rationally and base decisions mostly on price, customer loyalty isn’t considered. Companies outsource various activities, which enable them to improve efficiency, reduce costs, focus more on core competencies and improve their innovation capabilities. Supply Chain Management synchronizes the efforts of all parties—particularly suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, dealers, customers—involved in achieving customer’s needs. Despite much research, the relationship between customer loyalty and the supply chain strategy remains insufficiently explored and understood by practitioners and academics, while the theme has been extensively developed within marketing literature.
Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management is the result of years of work by the authors on different projects concerning the overlapping areas of supply chains, logistics and marketing, drawing a connection between the literature to provide a holistic picture of the customer loyalty framework. Emphasis is given to the B2B context, where recent research has provided some clues to support the fact that investment in operations, new technologies and organizational strategy have had a significant role in understanding B2B loyalty, particularly in the context of global supply chains. Moreover, the book provides a modernized and predictive model of B2B loyalty, showing a different methodological approach that aims at capturing the complexity of the phenomenon.
This book will be a useful resource for professionals and scholars from across the supply chain who are interested in exploring the dimension of customer loyalty in the challenging supplier and customer context.
Index
List of figures
List of tables
List of boxes
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: OVERLAPPING AREAS OF SUPPLY CHAIN AND MARKETING/ACHIEVING INTEGRATION BETWEEN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING
Research in Business-to-Business Marketing
Supply Chain Management: A Pillar for Business-to-Business Marketing
Chapter 2: CUSTOMER LOYALTY IN THE BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS CONTEXT
Customer loyalty background
The Role of Switching Costs on Customer Loyalty
Linking Customer Satisfaction on Customer Loyalty
Customer Value and Its Impact on Customer Loyalty
Logistics Service Quality and Its Impact on Customer Loyalty.
Trust, Commitment and Customer Loyalty
The Role of Managing Returns on Customer Loyalty
Customer Loyalty and Word of Mouth
Chapter 3: THE ERA OF OMNICHANNEL
From Offline to Online: The Impact of Digitalisation
From Multichannel to Omni-Channel—The Company Perspective
B2B Digital Transformation and requirements
Commitment to Digital at a Strategic Level
Content
Experience
Data Mining and Big Data Analytics
Measuring Digital Impact Through Key Performance Indicators
Chapter 4: MANAGING THE SUPPLY CHAIN IN THE DIGITAL CONTEXT
New issues for supply chain operations
Inventory System
Picking Processes
Assortment
Delivery Velocity
Product Returns Management
Organisation
Information Technology Systems
Chapter 5: THEORY, METHODS AND PRACTICE FOR MEASURING CUSTOMER LOYALTY
Introduction
Applying Complexity Theory to Customer Loyalty in a Business-to-Business Context
Study A. Measuring Value Perception
Biography
Ivan Russo, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at University of Verona. His research coalesces under the broad umbrella of supply chain management & marketing. He has published in the Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, International Journal of Production Economics, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, International Journal Of Quality And Service Sciences, International Journal Of Entrepreneurship And Small Business.
Ilenia Confente, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at University of Verona. Her research interests range from B2B to digital marketing. She has published in Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, International Journal of Tourism Research, International Journal Of Quality And Service Sciences, International Journal Of Entrepreneurship And Small Business.
'In this book, Russo and Confente isolate a key problem facing many businesses today: how to create value for the customer via the integration of the supply chain with other business functions. It’s packed with good ideas that have been vetted and tested by many of the leading thinkers in the area, and is definitely worth a look.' — Chad Autry, University of Tennessee
'Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management provides workable solutions for managing supply-chain management complexities to gain/maintain customer loyalty. A break-through book because of its nitty-gritty examples of data-based applications of asymmetric testing, this book is unique and highly valuable reading for both scholars and data managers working in supply chain management.' — Arch G. Woodside, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
