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It’s common to divide business strategy in some different levels, as follows: corporate, competitive and functional.
Hofer & Schendel (1978) and Lorange & Vancil (1977) argue the importance of the corporate strategy. For Porter in
Montgomery & Porter (1998), the corporate strategy is the generic plan of a dynamic company and can be divided in two
parts: business unit’s strategy and main corporate strategy. Johnson & Scholes (1999) define that the functional strategy is
related about how the company components (all kind of resources, procedures, human resources, etc.) can drive the
company to other strategies. After all, the strategy must be driven to reach and maintain competitive advantages over
competitors in a long term.
Porter (1985) make stable the idea of the importance of competitive advantages to company’s strategy. In his masterpiece
Competitive Advantage, he make it clear, clarifying that the right set of competitive advantages can be conclusive for the
success of the company’s strategy. Hax & Majluf (1991) assert that the competitive advantages set is the master key of
strategy and more, that the most primary goal of strategy is to reach and maintain competitive advantages. Henderson
(1989) in Montgomery & Porter (1998) agrees to this idea when he asserts that strategy is the mature of an action plan to
develop and adjust the competitive advantages in a company. Andrews (1987) says that the strategy must transform a
distinct ability of a company in a competitive advantage.
In this paper, we picked the concept of competitive advantage as a primary principle of business strategy in
business unit level. So, well structured workflows, specially the virtual customer care procedure, can be important to
establish competitive advantages in a long term.
3. Methodology
The main purpose of this study is to understand how the big Brazilian retail companies apply the virtual customer
care IT tools. The survey objectives are:
Studying and analyzing the virtual customer care IT tools.
Describing the application of the virtual customer care IT tools.
Measuring the performance of the virtual customer care IT tools.
To reach these research objectives, the following questions were pointed:
Which are the virtual customer care IT tools most frequently applied by the big Brazilian retail companies?
Which is the benchmark in each virtual customer care IT tool?
Do the companies have expressive different results in the application of the virtual customer care IT tools?
Convention