Evaluating customer orientation in e-commerce: an organization focused technology assessment*

This research focuses on designing a new maturity model to evaluate and plan an organization's customer-centricity. The Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM) is used as the primary methodology to quantify impacting factors and intensity of influence on the ultimate outcome. To demonstrate the proposed model in the real world, a case study is performed in the e-commerce industry, especially B2C online retailer organizations. This research tackles the scarcity of documentation on creating maturity models that are widely accepted and sustainable, demonstrating the innovative use of the HDM methodology. In summary, the study successfully achieves its overarching objective of crafting a comprehensive model for assessing organizational maturity in the customer-centric approach, encouraging the widespread adoption of the proposed methodology across diverse sectors.This study endeavors to introduce an innovative approach for assessing an organization's customer-centricity, incorporating both product and service deliverables, specifically referred to as Product-Service Systems (PSS). The primary objective of this research is to formulate a novel maturity model, enabling organizations to 1) assess their degree of customer-centricity and 2) receive actionable recommendations aimed at enhancing customer orientation and elevating their customer-centricity maturity level.