E-Relationship Through a Value Lens—Implications for Organizational Capability

ABSTRACT:Firms that extend their e-commerce platforms into customer decision-making to build relationships need to understand the customer journey or build e-relationships through a lens that the customer uses to assess the value created and fulfilled. By contrasting the value cycles that customers and firms use, four different activities are identified for firms with shorter and longer value cycles. By enabling customers to support value creation, fulfilling the value created by enlisting partners and expanding services, and engaging the customers during value-in-use, three organizations discussed in the published literature appear to have developed e-relationship strategies to create and sustain value both before and during COVID-19. This analysis led us to develop three different insights: customer empowerment, collaborative competency, and intelligent digital platform for organizational capability. These insights were used to analyze two different organizations interviewed during the 2020 period, as they faced many COVID-19 challenges, and assess the generalizability of these capabilities. We provide three recommendations for IS leaders for building e-relationships through a customer lens, by drawing on five case studies of companies to remain agile.