Strategic Alignment as an Antecedent of Customer Satisfaction: A Review of Literature

Abstract

: The economic globalization forces organizations to evolve in an ever more competitive, complex, and continuously changing and transforming environment. Business enterprises have to anticipate the market evolution triggered by changes in the environmental conditions, adopt strategic options for optimal fit, make a competitive value proposition, and to implement strategies able to establish and systematically address fundamental customers’ concerns in pursuit of the strategic objectives. A vast body of empirical literature indicates that service quality and customer satisfaction have leads to profitability and better performance of firms in the market place. The growth and diversity in the international business has brought about new challenges and heightened the competition of firms across the globe and as such firms have been forced to re-examine themselves internally in order to improve their performance. Organization should leverage on strategic alignment to create customer experience that would results in repeat purchase, customer retention, brand loyalty and customer referrals. Strategic alignment enables organization is central to matching the organizations decisions with actions, operations, processes, resources and capabilities which support achievement of strategic goals. This study sought to review existing conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature on strategic alignment and customer satisfaction with a view to highlighting the knowledge gaps suitable to form basis for future research work. Existing empirical literature on strategic alignment is replete with evidence of results that are not conclusive, different conceptualization of strategic alignment as well as diversity of contextual variables. The review also revealed key indicators of customer satisfaction as one of the outcomes of strategic alignment in organizations. Ultimately, a set of relationships were for the dimension strategic alignment and customer satisfaction were modeled as a guide for future research work in the field of strategic management.