CRM Implementation in Indian Telecom Industry – Evaluating the Effectiveness of Mobile Service Providers Using Data Envelopment Analysis

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 is seen as a key source of competitiveness for many Indian firms and hence have implications for leadership in such organizations. Faced with a growing market and increasing competition, companies in the telecom business are adopting to new technological imperatives in order to outperform their competitors. These companies adapt continuously to the dynamic environment so as to survive competition. The emphasis here lies in identifying critical value adding processes and redesigning them to become customer centric. One such approach in the adoption of an IT to move towards customers is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The Indian Mobile Service Providers are using CRM extensively to identify the needs of the customers and stretching out ways and means to satisfy them. In this context, it is absolutely essential to study the effectiveness of the CRM being practiced by the mobile service providers. This study specifically analyses the extent to which CRM is being practiced by the mobile service providers, and identifies the effect of the service quality of the mobile service providers on the Customer Loyalty. As CRM focuses on being customer centric, it becomes essential to measure the effectiveness of CRM in terms of the degree to which the customers are advocates of the mobile service provider as well as to measure the degree to which they participate in the cross selling and up selling of the various products and services of the provider. To evaluate the effectiveness, there are lots of quantitative techniques available and some work in this area has already been done. But there is a dearth of literature focusing on the relative efficiency. One advanced operations research technique which evaluates the relative efficiency is the Frontier Analysis or Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This paper attempts to use Data Envelopment Analysis to assess the effectiveness of Mobile Service Providers, specifically a set of the providers offering services in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The research has identified a set of input and output parameters for each Service Provider, from which the efficient frontiers (DMUs) are determined. The relative efficiency of the Service Providers are measured with respect to the efficient frontier and then analyzed. Detailed recommendations are set forth, for appropriate interventions to address the specific gaps identified through the gaps analysis. The analysis further provides useful information and opens up new avenues for future research.