Purpose: As expectations for great customer service rise, marketing, sales, and service departments need to work together strategically to meet those needs. Nonetheless, the protracted history of interface disputes across functional teams persists in garnering academic interest. Previous studies have focused more on conflicts between marketing and sales teams than on triadic interface conflicts among customer-oriented teams and associated sub-conflicts in a business-to-business (B2B) sales process. The aim of this research article is to quantify the triadic interface conflicts and related sub-conflicts across customer-focused teams, examine conflict resolution options, and conduct a sensitivity analysis (SA) to provide a comprehensive understanding of functional team conflict. Design/methodology/approach – The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) to find and fix problems in customer-focused team interfaces. Thirty managers from a big electronics business took part in this study. The authors gathered data from customer-oriented team managers during training sessions addressing interface disputes and conflict management/resolution tactics. The authors conduct sensitivity analysis to evaluate the resilience of dispute resolution approach rankings.

The results show that managers think that task is the most important conflict factor that drives teams apart, followed by lack of communication. For the sub-conflicts, managers said that the most essential conflict characteristic was how to accomplish the work, and the second most important was not having frequent meetings. Managers thought that working together or integrating was the greatest way to resolve conflicts, followed by compromise. Using the AHP-based MCDM to settle disagreements across customer-focused teams gives managers faith in the reliability and strength of these solutions. Testing the SA also showed that the final conclusion was strong (stable) even when the priority of the primary factors that affect the choice were raised and lowered by 5% in every combination. This research investigated a substantial B2B enterprise within the electronics sector in African and Middle Eastern contexts, concentrating on interface issues across customer-oriented divisions. Subsequent studies may rectify these constraints.