The Application of the Service-Profit Chain in the Mobile Industry

In view of a lack of service benchmarking framework, this research aims to develop a holistic telecommunication services industry benchmarking framework based on the service-profit chain concept and the characteristics of the cellular industry. The framework is based on idea from relevant literature. The authors discovered that nine constructs including three input constructs (e.g., service provider, competitors, and customer), five intermediate constructs (e.g., customer's perceptions, customer satisfaction (CS), customer trust (CT), customer loyalty (CL), and customer retention (CR)), and one output construct (e.g., profit) should be included in the model. In addition, contrary to previous works, it was found that each component of the service package (i.e., core, supplementary, and value-added services) should be considered as an individual element instead of a single complete service package. However, the nine constructs and their mutual links need to be tested and validated in the future. The main contribution of this research is the developed telecommunication services benchmarking framework linking together sources of sustainable competitive advantages - five intermediate constructs. While most researches tended to consider the complete service package as a single element, this work segregate the single package into several relevant service components. Hence, with limited resources, the relative level of impact of each service element on CS, CL, CR and profit could assist the formulation of service improvement efforts. In the other word, knowing the order-of-importance of service components, managements could allocate resources accordingly.