EXEMPLIFYING CUSTOMERS’ INTELLIGENCE AND PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE FROM TEXTILE INDUSTRY IN NIGERIA

 

Aloysius Isowede¹ Chinonye Moses² Oladele Kehinde³ Odunayo P Salau⁴ Oluwatoyin Adesanya⁵

¹Department of Business Management, Covenant University, NIGERIA, globalaloy@gmail.com

²Covenant University, NIGERIA, chinonye.moses@covenantuniversity.edu.ng

³Covenant University, NIGERIA, oladele.kehinde@covenantuniversity.edu.ng

⁴Covenant University, NIGERIA, odunayo.salau@covenantuniversity.edu.ng

⁵Department of Business Management, Covenant University, NIGERIA, oluwatoyin.adesanya@stu.cu.edu.ng

 

 

Abstract

The business environment has become highly intense due to feasible variables such as technology and globalization. Companies are striving for a competitive benefit over their competitors to survive in such a volatile setting. Customer intelligence remains a growing phase in Nigeria, most especially in the Textile Industry and has become one of the key management ideas in latest years. In a recent report, Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association observed that hundreds of textile businesses across the nation as moribund and as of 2018, at least 60 textile businesses had closed shops in Lagos with a total of 66,250 employees. At least 18 other significant textile firms were also said to have collapsed in the last five years with 19,300 employees across the nation. The seemingly decrease in performance of the Textile firms in Nigeria appears to have been caused by their inability to understand customers’ expectation and slow response to customers’ demand for quality products and services offered in the market. As a result, this study ascertains whether customer intelligence can be used to sustain the performance of textile industry in Nigeria. Additionally, this paper adopts resource‐based view, contingency theory and institutional theory to explain and predict issues raised in the study. The survey method of descriptive approach was employed to establish trends and draw inferences. The target population comprised five (5) active textile companies with 313 staff members of the Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association in Lagos state, Nigeria. Structured questionnaire was purposively adopted and copies were administered during the association’s meetings. The validity and reliability of the instrument were established and data collected were analysed using measurement and structural equation modelling (SEM) to establish fitness and strength of relationship at 5% level of significance. The result obtained established that the sub-variables of the customer intelligence – communication (emails, social media platforms, ecommerce, webs and mobile), customer engagement (campaigns, messaging, offers, guidance, and recommendations) and intelligence (behavioural profiling, interests, real-time feedback, customer driven insight, attitudinal scores, and engagement values) are significant predictors of sustainable performance (R = .549, R2 = .301, p < .05). This implies that 30.1% of the change in the sustainable performance was due to customer intelligence latent constructs in the model. The study reveals that the selected textile firms internally centre their attention more on what they can do to improve their products, ultimately attracting new customers without paying attention to what other firms are doing. Hence, the study recommends that the complexity of the business environment requires managers to adopt customer engagement optimization for developing new and better products/services, adopting aggressive pricing strategies, finding new ways to satisfy customers’ expectations, facilitating optimal positioning and increasing performance of the textile industry.

Keywords: Customer intelligence, Performance, Competitiveness, Textile industry