Quality of service in mobile phone industry in madurai district

• Author: Dr. A. Shabinullah Khan/Dr. A. Abbas Manthiri

Introduction

The telecommunication sector, especially the mobile phone sector, in India is one of the fastest growing business segments of the country which provide a lot of value addition to the society with its service and creation of employment opportunities. In dynamic global environment, every country is striving to bridge the digital divide and become competitive. Today, society is living with advance technology and everyone wants to keep pace with the new technologies. Mobile phone industry is growing larger because it has become a necessity. Parents are getting mobile phones for their teens because they want to communicate in case of an emergency and the wireless carriers have made it easy to add users to their existing plans. This increases buyers and increases market size worldwide. The competitive environment in mobile phone industry in the universe has become intense. Moreover, the forces of liberalization and globalization of telecommunication market have pressurized the companies to maintain their market share by focusing on retaining their current customer. They are being increasingly confronted with the challenges to attract their subscribers by providing high quality of services. With the increase in the cost of acquisition of new customers, cellular mobile companies continually seek new ways to acquire, retain and increase their subscriber base. Thus the ability to retain existing customer is increasingly crucial in this industry. This is possible only by providing quality services to the customers. Hence, quality of service from mobile phone users’ perspective needs to be studied with a view to facilitate its measurement. An evaluation of relative importance of mobile phone service quality dimensions is essential to identify the effects of these dimensions on customer perception of mobile phone service quality. It is essential that service quality of mobile phone users be evaluated on regular basis to identify weaknesses, and emerging trends in the service. In this Article, the quality of service provided by the mobile phone industry in Madurai District is probed.

Review of Literature

The changing paradigm of business has made the provision of quality of services as top priority for organizations. Customer-focused strategy has become a means of competitive advantage and survival for organizations (Taylor & Baker, 1994). Perceived service quality and its measurement has become essential focus for the organization in designing and implementing a customer oriented strategy (MacStravic, 1977).

In 2008, Telecom Regulatory Authority India carried out quality of service survey of mobile operators based on users’ satisfaction. The sample consisted of 1318 mobile phone users. The important dimensions of regulatory services benchmark dimensions of service quality included billing, customer care, availability of network, value-added services and pre-sales and sales dimensions. Out of 11 operators, only five operators achieved the 90% service quality benchmark (Survey, 2008).

The changing paradigm of business has made the provision of quality of services as top priority for organizations. Customer-focused strategy has become a means of competitive advantage and survival for organizations (Taylor & Baker, 1994). Perceived service quality and its measurement has become essential focus for the organization in designing and implementing a customer oriented strategy (MacStravic, 1977).

The delivery of a service has been described as a ‘performance’ featuring the service provider and the customer (Bitner, 1992). It is during this performance that the actions and behaviour of service employees become the “Crucial determinants of service quality as perceived by consumers (Hartline and Ferrell, 1996)”.

Service researchers have suggested that the search for universal conceptualization of the service quality construct may be futile (Levitt, 1981, Lovelock, 1983) and arguments have been advanced to suggest that service quality is either in specific or context specific (Babakus and Boller, 1992). Thus to be of practical utility, a service construct should not only be operational (non-global), but also context specific. The identification of service quality variables in the mobile phone service industry is based...