An empirical study of a novel managing customer power model and business performance in the mobile service industry

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of dividing the companies’ customers into different priority groups to be served according to their payment history and feedback on the business performance areas: service quality (SQ), business process time (BPT), business process cost (BPC) and customer satisfaction (CS).

Design/methodology/approach

A new numerical model to improve CS service waiting time according to their priority queue class, particularly customers in the high priority queue class will be proposed. To validate the proposed numerical model, a call centre at the selected telecommunication company is used as a case study. An empirical analysis based on data from 130 business and IT managers is used to evaluate and investigate if it has an impact on business process (BP) performance. Bivariate correlation analysis was used to test four hypotheses. The results were subjected to reliability and validity analyses.

Findings

The results show that managing customer power is positively associated with BP performance. Furthermore, the results indicate that by using the proposed numerical model, the customers’ satisfaction can be improved.

Research limitations/implications

The paper has some limitations as it is only tested on one real business organizations and one BP service. Furthermore, the study was conducted only in telecommunication companies. The questionnaires were answered only by IT and business managers in Saudi Arabian telecommunication companies. Therefore, the results cannot be used as a standard and might not be directly transferrable to any sized firm and any other country. Moreover, the results may be affected by common method variance as the authors collected the data from participants by using the same survey and at the same time.

Social implications

The results of this research provide important evidence for business managers and business analysts that managing customers power can enhance the business performance.

Originality/value

To date, there is only a few researches have been conducted in the area of separating customers into different priority groups to provide services according to their required delivery time, payment history and feedback. However, most of them have not been evaluated in the business environment. Moreover, no previous study has attempted to empirically demonstrate the relationship between creating a BP model which can manage customer power, SQ, BPT, BPC and CS.

Citation

Alotaibi, Y. and Liu, F. (2014), "An empirical study of a novel managing customer power model and business performance in the mobile service industry", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 6, pp. 816-843. https://doi.org/10.1108/BPMJ-07-2013-0099