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More Than One Way To Create Competitive Advantage

More than One Way to Create Competitive Advantage What is a competitive advantage? Competitive advantage is the firm’s ability to create value to the customers in ways its rivals cannot (Steven). In the article, “Will you survive the Services Revolution” by Professor Uday Karmarkar, Karmarkar argues that for a service company to have a competitive advantage it needs to have command of the end-to-end information chain and offer end-to-end service (5). Not all business professors agree with Karmarkar and Professor Steven E. Phelan is one them, He teaches his students that there are many different strategies to achieve competitive advantage and commanding the information chain end-to-end and providing end-to-end service is not the only way (Steven). *Keeping i*n Touch *and Growing *by Breaking the Information Chain Professor Karmarkar advises service companies to gain a competitive advantage by changing their processes and organizational structure so that the information chain is not broken (5). Karmarkar argues that companies should not outsource customer service functions for example, because they are a critical part of the information chain and companies will loose touch with their customers (5). In 2000, Dell added large servers to its product array (Frei). The server market is part of the high-end market in technology where corporate customers demand responsive service (Frei). As an incumbent to the market with little expertise in service operations, Dell decided to outsource on-site customer service to third-party providers in order to have the level of service customers desired (Frei). These third party suppliers gave Dell what it wanted, low cost, high qualityservice (Frei). The author would argue that Dell could have lost touch with its customers by outsourcing this function. Dell did not lose touch with its customers because it implemented a system that assessed customer experience with the third-party providers to monitor the customer experience. Dell’s...