Identifying leaders and laggards—A method and application to US local telephone companies

Performance attributes of public utilities vary in definition according to the stakeholder: service provider, customer or regulator. A framework is provided for defining, measuring and ranking service quality from multiple perspectives by developing a “quadrant analysis” method. This method is applied and US local telephone companies are ranked over time as leaders and laggards or biased according to one, two and three stakeholder perspectives. Application of the method to 1994–2001 data for the US local telephone industry suggests that some local companies hold their position consistently as leaders among their peers in the industry and some continue to lag behind. While the leaders could be studied for best practices the analysis of the laggards’ practices would also yield valuable insights regarding good practice as perceived by the different stakeholders.