Maturity Model for Customer-Centric Approach in Enterprise: The Case of E-commerce and Online Retail Industry

Abstract

The network technologies are changing the dynamics of the interaction between customer and provider. Customers demand closer relationships and higher investment between partners, as well as cooperation between companies to build supporting technologies for their unique needs. Customer-centricity is defined as interaction with the customer through various touchpoints and aggregating these relations to create a position for the customer. Each Customer has a different need and expectation from the provider or seller, and companies need to be flexible enough to fulfill their needs. One of the reasons organizations invest less in customer experience is that they believe they are already customer-centric organizations. Companies need to deploy structured methods to evaluate their customer-centricity as it is now to achieve this purpose. Also, the techniques should enable them to plan the organization's evolution toward the customer-centric approach strategically. This research focuses on designing a new maturity model to evaluate and plan an organization's customer-centricity. The Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM) is used as the primary methodology to quantify impacting factors and intensity of influence on the ultimate outcome. To demonstrate the proposed model in the real world, a case study is performed in the E-commerce industry, especially B2C online retailer organizations. This industry is selected because of the high impact of customer-centricity on the success of businesses. Also, in order to deliver the best experience, e-commerce firms need to stay on top of cutting-edge technologies and related practices.