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The mobile communication industry is a highly customer-oriented industry. Nonetheless, the characteristics of intangiles and variances embedded in the service make the quality of service in this industry hard to be evaluated. Under such circumstances, the contact interface between a store and its customers becomes an important way to understand the real needs of customers for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
To examine the store-customer interface, the study identifies and diagnoses the store management process of a specific mobile communication firm with the intentions to explore the effective criteria of store operation process and probe the critical loops in store manangent, which can serve as the basis of managerial training programs and thus advance overall firm competitive advantage.
The study is one of the pioneering studies in exploring the operation process of stores in the mobile communication industry. Prior research on store management simply focuses on issues with regard to customer or employee satisfaction in the contexts of either restaurants or department stores. Most of studies in mobile communication industry paid attention to the interfirm rivalry or product-matrix planning. The study fills an unmet gap by indentifying the real contact interface between stores and their customers. Implications for practices and future directions are discussed.
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