Leveraging Digital Technologies: How Information Quality Leads to Localized Capabilities and Customer Service Performance

Abstract

With the growing recognition of the customer’s role in service creation and delivery, there is an increased impetus on building customer-centric organizations. Digital technologies play a key role in such organizations. Prior research studying digital business strategies has largely focused on building production-side competencies and there has been little focus on customer-side digital business strategies to leverage these technologies. We propose a theory to understand the effectiveness of a customer-side digital business strategy focused on localized dynamics—here, a firm’s customer service units (CSUs). Specifically, we use a capabilities perspective to propose digital design as an antecedent to two customer service capabilities—namely, customer orientation capability and customer response capability—across a firm’s CSUs. These two capabilities will help a firm to locally sense-and-respond to customer needs, respectively. Information quality from the CSU’s digital design is proposed as the antecedent to the two capabilities. Proposed capability-building dynamics are tested using data collected from multiple respondents across 170 branches of a large bank. Findings suggest that the impacts of information quality in capability-building are contingent on the local process characteristics. We offer implications for a firm’s customer-side digital business strategy and present new areas for future examination of such strategies.