Antecedents of Customer Agility from the Perspective of Customer Knowledge Management Capability The Context of Brick and Mortar Retail Sector

Abstract

In a highly volatile customer-centric business environment, customer agile capability newlineof business firms determines the survival and success. For this speedy and effective newlinecustomer sense response system, how an actionable Customer Knowledge (CK) can newlinebe developed and what kind of resource infrastructure is relevant? The aim of the newlinepresent research is to examine customer agility and its resource pre-conditions from the newlineCustomer Knowledge Management (CKM) perspective, drawing upon the key theories newlineof Resource Based View (RBV), Knowledge Based View (KBV) and Dynamic newlineCapabilities Framework (DCF).The study was taken up in brick-and-mortar retail newlinesector that is dynamic and has access to vast amount of customer knowledge. A survey newlineof extensive literature review showed that there is a dearth of resource CKM newlinecustomer agility frameworks. The key findings indicated that customer agility and newlinecustomer sensing are positively influenced significantly by all the three resources of newlineorganization structure, culture and website customer knowledge infrastructure; and newlinecustomer responding capability is by organization structure and organization culture newlineonly. Contrary to prior studies, organization structure was found have significant newlinepositive impact on customer agility. CKM s mediating role was evident for customer newlineagility and customer responding only. The study provides testable propositions linking newlinetechnological and social resources of the firm with customer agile capability via CKM, newlineespecially in times when many retails are migrating to omnichannel format. Study can newlinefurther be extended as to how customer knowledge can be utilized for enhancing newlinecustomer experience online and offline.