Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la soutenance de Monsieur Mohamed RADY MOHAMED OSMAN qui défendra ses travaux en Sciences de Gestion en vue de l’obtention du doctorat le vendredi 9 décembre 2022, à partir de 14h00 dans les locaux de l’IAE de Poitiers.
Préparée dans le cadre du laboratoire CEREGE (UR 13564), sous la direction de Monsieur Thomas STENGER, cette thèse s’intitule : « Organization culture and Customer orientation: The role of Social Networking Sites »
La composition du jury est la suivante :
- Monsieur Thomas STENGER, Professeur, Université de Poitiers, Directeur de la Recherche
- Madame Béatrice SIADOU-MARTIN, Professeur, Université de Montpellier, Rapporteur
- Monsieur Eric MILLIOT, Professeur, Université de Nantes, Rapporteur
- Monsieur Ewan OIRY, Professeur, UQAM Montréal, Suffragant
- Monsieur André LE ROUX, Professeur, Université de Poitiers, Suffragant
- Monsieur Vincent DUTOT, Professeur, EM Normandie, Suffragant
La soutenance aura lieu dans la salle de réunion de l’IAE de Poitiers (soutenance publique).
Abstract:
The predictions of growing customers’ power in the digital age that predated the turn of the century were fueled by the rise of the Internet, then reignited by social networking sites. This research explores the intersection of customer orientation and social networks technology by clearly defining customer orientation and empowerment in social networks contexts. It presents closely a literature review of different views of customer orientation: responsive and proactive customer orientation, Internal and External customer’s orientation, Customer-led philosophy and market-oriented philosophy. Furthermore, it highlights the evolutionary role of technology in developing the customers’ power sources using social networks sites and discusses the nature of shifts in power from marketers and companies to consumers in terms of each source. In other words, social networks sites clearly transform the power balance between customers and companies as the customers’ power becomes definitely greater than before (Cabezudo, Izquierdo, & Pinto, 2013).This research contributes to existing marketing literature by offering a framework contributes to the existing marketing literature by offering a framework that explores the business perspective of customer orientation in the context of social networks sites especially for in ICT sector companies (Information and Communications Technology) and compare these business practices of customer orientation with customers’ point of view to discover the discrepancies. The framework provides the structure for this thesis, which seeks to contribute achieving the aimed objectives in three ways. It begins with organizing a fragmented body of literature by linking customers’ social networks sites participation with evolving sources of power. This followed by highlighting gaps in existing literature related to a gap in business practice of customer orientation in proactive environment and voice-of-the-customer (VOC) processes that poorly suit anticipating what customers will value in the future. And finally, the current framework establishes a basis for identifying the means of investigation related to questions of customers’ power, empowerment, and potential disempowerment in social networks environment.
Therefore, the discussion will begin by reviewing the literature search on Social networks sites and organization culture then customer orientation background and definition then the influence of social networks sites on customer orientation and relation culture inside the organization. This research applies the exploratory qualitative approach to develop the constructs from company perspective on the one hand and from customers’ perspective on other hand. This approach allows the use of “customer’s voice” to assess (1) what customer orientation means to customers from social networks perspective, and (2) how social networks influence the customer orientation culture for the firms.
In-depth semi-structured interviews are conducted to provide a clear accurate vision on the subject thanks to the experts’ knowledge to explore firms’ practices of customer-orientation by using social networks. In addition, Netnography qualitative data collection method has been used for exploiting social networks, using the methodological framework developed by Kozinets (2002,2010,2013), More than five thousands social networks sites pages of texts have been coded using Atlas.ti & and interpreted into thematic findings. Consequently, the result confirms inescapably the main attributes of Denison’s organizational culture model DOCS (Denison et al., 2004) that is relevant to social networks sites and lead the customer orientation culture practises within the organization. Hence, Denison’s organizational culture model (DOCS) can be considered a popular and practically applicable model in this regard as it is based on four culture traits: involvement, consistency, adaptability and mission, each of them having three sub-groups. Therefore, the Denison model of organizational culture (Denison et al., 2004) has become one of the most popular models for analysing the organizational culture.
As a result, this research is a first attempt to provide an in-depth overview of business perspective of customer orientation in context of social networks sites as a customer-oriented technology and clients’ interactions towards them by analysis customers’ feedback extracted from social networks sites pages (Twitter and LinkedIn) and this feedback is linked with Denison model attributes. Accordingly, the research provides a quick analysis of using both social network sites (Twitter and LinkedIn) to show discrepancies between the point of view of the customers and point of view of company regarding customer orientation practices. In the context of our work, our results show lower presence of consistency dimension in our case study correspond to Denison’s model definition. Moreover, the results show lower presence of mission dimension correspond to Denison’s model treat (Denison et al., 2004) as firms has no long-term vision for how they will use social networks sites as a customer oriented technology to support their customers.In addition, our results show that firms use social network sites more responsively (brand engagement and brand awareness) than proactive environment. In other words, firms react responsively to customers (78.48 %) more than react proactively (21.52 %), this finding helps in answering the research question about the companies’ practices of customer orientation in the context of social networks sites.
In the context of the present research, the findings confirm that the higher customer-orientation culture influence, the higher organization responds to customers’ demand (Deshpande et al., 1993) and indicate a continuous and proactive disposition towards the identification and response to customers’ demands (Han, Kim, & Srivastava, 1998). Likewise, the finding agreed with the main result of (Chandy & Tellis, 1998; Day1994; Slater and Narver 1995) which argues that customer-oriented company not only responds to existing customer needs (responsive) but also discovers the future and latent needs (proactively). Therefore, the company should have exploration capabilities (proactively) rather than the existing exploitation capabilities (responsive) which become insufficient.
Additionally, the result clarifies that the adaptability dimension in Denison’s model is moderated as occupies around 50 % of the result which reflects strongly on the responsive strategy that company follows. As a consequence, the result clarifies that social networks sites help the organizations to have more adaptive strategy (social CRM = 50.58 %) which leads to customer oriented environment. Thus, this result agreed with Rodriguez et al. (2015) statement. Incontrovertibly, the result and discussion can answer the research questions related to the companies’ practices of customer orientation in the context of social networks sites in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector.
Consequently, our findings confirm that there are discrepancies between the point of view of the customers and point of view of company, the result shows that the companies utilizing social networks strategies focus on providing customers with awareness and engagement (39.01%), more than providing services to the customer (36%). As a result, this research recommends that firms have to exert more efforts to narrow the gap of customer orientation in the proactive environment which currently are poorly suited to anticipate what customers will value in the future.
Keywords:
Social networks sites, social CRM, Customer orientation, proactive environment – organizational culture, business practices, Denison model attributes.