Managing the Customer Perceived Service Quality for Cellular Mobile Telephony: An Empirical Investigation

With the liberalization and internationalization in telecommunication, service quality has become an important means of differentiation and path to achieve business success. Such differentiation based on service quality can be a key source of competitiveness for many Indian firms and hence have implications for leadership in such organizations. For the past few years, cellular mobile service sector in India has been experiencing the highest growth rate in terms of subscribers and revenues. With the increasing demands of the customer, cellular mobile sector has become competitive. Despite this, most of the cellular mobile service providers in India are primarily focusing on expanding their customer base and tend to overlook investing in service quality. A thorough review of literature revealed that most of the studies reported on service quality focused on the service delivery aspects, ignoring the role of technical quality. The present study strives to develop a valid and reliable instrument to measure customer perceived service quality incorporating both service delivery as well as technical quality aspects. Through a survey of 225 regular users of cellular mobile services, a seven dimensional service quality instrument is revealed, which is empirically tested for unidimensionality, reliability, and construct validity using confirmatory factor analysis. The resulting validated instrument comprised of dimensions including reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, tangibles, convenience, and customer perceived network quality. Further, the results of the regression analysis highlighted the priority areas of service improvement. The study indicated that among the various dimensions, responsiveness is the best predictor, followed by reliability, customer perceived network quality, assurance, convenience, empathy, and tangibles. Thus, superior performance on the most important dimension, responsiveness may be helpful in providing enhanced quality of service. The major managerial implications of study include the following: The service quality instrument so developed can be used by managers for periodic monitoring of service quality as perceived by customers. The study also provides directions to service providers as to which particular dimension require attention in terms of their importance. This would enable the service providers to focus resources in accordance with the importance of these dimensions. Further, the service quality index derived by aggregating the scores on these dimensions can also be developed, which can be used for benchmarking their performance against competitors. The instrument is developed and validated by collecting data from customers in India. There may be a possibility of cultural differences playing a role in the outcome of the study. Thus, there is a need to explore these results for other developing and developed economies. The future studies may also take into account the factors that influence service quality for corporate customers.