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USING THE RETENTION PROCESS IN AN ENTERPRISE PROVIDING TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES TO IMPROVE THE COMPETITIVE POSITION.

P. Kovarikova, L. Branska

Abstract

One of the most important expressions of the current structural changes in the developed countries is the growing importance of the tertiary sector (also known as the service sector), which has been recorded primarily over the past twenty years. Currently, the OECD countries produce in services about 70 percent of the added value and the development of this share has continued to have a growing trend [1]. Prosperity of the country as a whole is thus significantly affected by the performance of companies providing services, including telecommunications companies. In the past 20 years, telecommunications and mobile services in the world and in the Czech Republic has undergone a rapid development and technological shift. Since the early 1990s, however, conditions for business of individual telecom firms in the Czech Republic have been gradually getting worse, especially due to increasing competition as a result of globalization and the entry of new mobile operators on the market, as well as a growing negative attitude of customers as a result of an approach of telecommunications companies to their customers favouring profit before customer value. However, in the long term, only those companies may be successful that offer customers a higher value than the competition does. This requires building a truly fully functional quality management based on the identification and management of all business processes. One of the key processes for satisfying customers of the telecommunications company is the innovation process. In order to implement it successfully, companies need to find appropriate sources of invention for innovation of the telecommunications services supply and also create mechanisms to acquire, process and store information needed as inputs into the innovation process. The retention process can be a very good source of information for the innovation process. Telecommunications companies include it in their own system of processes in particular to retain dissatisfied and defecting customers from the pre-paid segment (customers without a contract using telecommunication services on the basis of prepaid cards) and customers of the post-paid segment (i.e. retail customers using telecommunication services on the basis of paying regular monthly subscription fees). Considering that tens of thousands of customers who contact the company if dissatisfied pass the retention process monthly, the retention process can be considered a very valuable source of information about the imperfections of the previous range of services offered. The forthcoming article publishes the results of a primary research conducted in the spring of 2014 in a company providing telecommunications services. It deals with the retention process, its purpose, course, outputs and analyses how to improve its current course in order to make it an important source of information to innovate the range of services offered to individual customers and thus to contribute to improving the competitive position of the company.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2014/b23/s7.096

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