Service, People and Customer Orientation: A Capability View to CRM and Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Abstract

In today’s highly competitive business environment enterprises are continuously striving to achieve a sustainable advantage. This sustainable advantage can be accomplished only when the enterprise is realizes a value-creating strategy, simultaneously not being implemented by any current or potential competitor(s) and when other firms are unable to replicate the benefits of this strategy. A very little literature is available that investigates the relationship among customer relationship management (CRM) capability variables and sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). In this backdrop, the article tries to analyse the role of CRM capability towards the goal of SCA. It identifies three CRM capability factors, that is, service capability, personnel capability and customer orientation and examines their effect on SCA. Structural equation modelling (SEM) has been used on a sample of 204 respondents who were selected randomly from the population of bank employees. The data have been collected from the bank employees through a structured questionnaire. The findings of the study reveal that CRM capability (having three domains—service capability, personnel capability and customer orientation) has a significantly positive impact on the SCA. This article contributes to the theory by examining CRM capability variables and tries to determine their impact on SCA in the banking sector, as CRM is now becoming strategically crucial in the banking industry.