Gaining Customer Loyalty with Tracking Information Quality in B2B Logistics

Although vendor firms invest heavily in technologies to digitalize business-to-business (B2B) service orchestration, little is known about the mechanisms through which high quality information, a key resource generated from digitalization, creates customer loyalty. Positioning our work in the B2B logistics services context, we take a customer needs fulfillment perspective to understand value creation and capture from digitalization of service orchestration in B2B logistics relationships. We suggest that a vendor will capture exchange value, manifesting as customer loyalty, for the customer’s perceived use value of the service enabled by tracking information quality on service orchestration. We propose that service flexibility and service efficiency provided by the logistics vendor are two types of use value for customers, which serve as the value-creation pathways through which tracking information quality affects customer loyalty, the exchange value received by the vendor. We further argue that service modal variety, a key aspect of service complexity, moderates the value-creation pathways of tracking information quality. Using survey and archival data of B2B relationships between a Fortune 100 logistics vendor and its major customers, we find empirical support for the use value mechanisms through which tracking information quality affects customer loyalty in the context of B2B logistics services.