Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management ─ Business-to-Business Customer Loyalty Analysis

Companies can achieve success and customer retention not only through the provision of good products but also by offering effective services and developing good relationships with supply chain members. Many business-to-business (B2B) managers think that their customers act rationally and base decisions mostly on price, customer loyalty doesn't enter into the logic. To enhance their competitiveness, many companies outsource various activities, which enable them to improve their operational efficiency, to reduce costs, to focus more on their core competencies and to 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 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. In particular, the emphasis is given to the B2B context, where recent research has provided some clues to support the fact that the investment in operations, new technologies and organizational strategy have had significant role in understanding B2B loyalty, due to ever-increasing incidences of service failure stemming from the lengthening of global supply chains.

Ivan Russo, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at University of Verona. His research coalesces under the broad umbrella of supply chain management & marketing. He has published in the Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, International Journal of Production Economics, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, International Journal Of Quality And Service Sciences, International Journal Of Entrepreneurship And Small Business.

Ilenia Confente, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at University of Verona. Her research interests range from B2B to digital marketing. She has published in Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, International Journal of Tourism Research, International Journal Of Quality And Service Sciences, International Journal Of Entrepreneurship And Small Business.