Tri-service model: a concept of service quality

Abstract

In this highly competitive and increasingly saturated market, the telecommunication industry can only gain profit by retaining their existing customers by providing high service quality. Using the Indian Public Sector Units (PSUs) as an example, this work aims at studying the major factors of service quality and assessing the customer’s perceived quality of three services (fixed-line, broadband, and mobile). A systematic hybrid multiple criteria decision-making method that combines the analytical hierarchical process technique and the fuzzy synthetic evaluation has been used to examine the service quality framework and evaluate the quality level of the three services used by the PSU customers. The interdependence relation shows that interaction quality, environment quality, provisioning quality, communication quality, value-added service quality, grievance handling quality, and tariff management are the seven major factors in terms of service quality. Grievance handling and interaction qualities and tariff management have become the hygiene factors with regard to customer satisfaction. The assessment of the quality level of three services used by the PSU customers in India suggested that poor service quality enhances the risk of customer migration. The results also indicate that strong interaction and grievance-handling strategies with better communication quality can retain the existing customers. The results presented are limited to the Indian society. It may be adapt to measure service quality of different telecom operators under cross-cultural environment. This research contributes to the literature in the following ways: firstly, it identifies the different quality factors for the telecom service providers in India to assess their service quality. In the next stage, this research examines the priorities of these factors, and in the last, it demonstrates the consumer’s perception of PSU service quality. The quality of service depends on the better interaction and timely solution of the grievances. The relative importance of the factors of telecom service quality has been investigated, and a site-plan for customer retention in the telecom industry has been provided to the managers. To the best of our knowledge, no researchers have tested the service quality of three telecom services on a single platform.