Customer-centric support services in the digital era

Abstract

The chapter presents key discussions about customer-centric services – a key focus area for most organisations intending to acquire a competitive advantage in the digital era. This chapter elaborates upon the key dynamics that enable an organisation to build customer-centric services across the phases of the customer journey – the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. Underlying most customer-centric initiatives is a focus on building customer orientation and response capabilities. First, customer orientation requires that the customer is the centre of the firm’s thinking across all functions. Second, customer response entails developing advanced capabilities that leverage the internet and digital technologies to enable the customer access to the firm’s offering, enabling their pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase activities. While an integrative literature review approach has been adopted to critically review and synthesise the literature on this subject matter, it is anticipated that this chapter contributes to research on customer-centric support services as the next frontier for competitive advantage in the digital era. The reflective nature of this chapter needs to be acknowledged and likewise its inherent limitations. The study was highly conceptual, thus opening an opportunity for future research to explore and empirically validate the identified theoretical trends.