Customer competency for improving firm decision-making performance in e-commerce
ISSN: 1463-6689
Article publication date: 10 February 2020
Issue publication date: 20 March 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze customers’ purchasing behavior with respect to perceived benefit and the perceived risk towards customer competency in firms. In this research, the authors validate the concept of customer competency in eight dimensions (i.e. e-trust, quality of products and services, customer support, application design, reasonable price, availability of user-generated content, replacement and returns and risk in purchasing products) and examine empirically its impression on company’s decision-making performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The findings are based on an empirical analysis of survey data from 69 respondents and demonstrate a large, significant and positive relationship between customer competency and firm’s decision-making performance.
Findings
The results reveal that majorly three dimensions of competency, i.e. application design, reasonable price and user-generated content (UGC), will impact significantly the decision making performance of firm. This is the empirical study to conceptualize, operationalize and validate the concept of customer competency and to study its impact on decision-making performance. The validity of customer competency constructs as conceived and operationalized suggests the potential future scope by evaluating its relationship with possible antecedents and consequences. For practitioners, the result provides important guidelines for increasing firm’s decision-making performance through the use of customer behavior.
Research limitations/implications
Further in this research, it is critical to understand that other constructs of customer competency may likewise play an important part in the advancement of expectations of customers. These constructs comprise customers’ self-effectiveness, encouragement and innovation thinking (i.e. observed comparative advantage, complexity and compatibility) of business-to-customer firms in e-commerce. Future research studying these constructs could improve the understanding of success factors for e-commerce firms. The model used in this study can further be extended to understand the variance in a firm’s decision-making.
Originality/value
The prime target of this questionnaire was to gather all of the information about how consumers behave while interacting with e-commerce portals. The questions were based on the factors identified in literature reviews. Previous studies also look at consumer competency toward a particular internet portal and its vendors; however, through this survey, the authors want to look at how consumers behave while shopping on e-commerce portals. This was a clear representation of the authors’ research strategy.
Keywords
Citation
Gupta, V., Gupta, L. and Dhir, S. (2020), "Customer competency for improving firm decision-making performance in e-commerce", Foresight, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 205-222. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-06-2019-0053
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited