Being Responsive to Your Customer: Developing Customer Agility through Information Management

As e-commerce offers new channels for companies to reach consumers, it also brings about significant challenges to the ability to response to customer changing needs, which is named “customer agility”. Both practitioners and researchers consider information management as a source of customer agility. Drawing on the information management literature, this research program attempts to propose an integrative information management framework to study the achievement of customer agility. Subsequently, a process model of how information management helps firms achieve customer agility will be developed. This is achieved by conducting a case study of a Chinese B2C company. This research in progress article presents the preliminary findings from the first visit to the company. It shows that customer agility is achieved through establishing information management structure, developing information management capability and instilling information behaviors and values. More interviews will be conducted in the next phase and the findings will be expanded.