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.
Despite much research on the subject in recent years, the relationship between customer loyalty- intended as a buyer's intent to repurchase from a given supplier- and the supply chain strategy remains insufficiently explored and understood by practitioners and academics, while the theme has been extensively developed within the marketing literature. This book fills the gap, drawing a connection between marketing and supply chain literature in order to provide a holistic picture of the customer loyalty framework. It examines how to enhance loyalty, such as value, satisfaction, inventory management, distribution chnnel and so forth, to provide a clear picture of B2B supply chain loyalty.
'In this book, Russo and Confente isolate a key problem facing many businesses today: how to create valuefor 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 Managementprovides 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
