Building marketing strategies for state-owned enterprises against private ones based on the perspectives of customer satisfaction and service quality

In the process of deregulation and privatization, profit-seeking state-owned as well as private enterprises typically compete directly in the same market. This paper employed two data sets, namely those from the banking and gas station industries in Taiwan, to fulfill two objectives. The first is to evaluate the effectiveness of state-owned enterprises as measured by service quality and customer satisfaction. The second objective is to develop the key marketing strategies for these state-owned enterprises according to simultaneous importance-performance analysis. The results show that customers’ overall satisfaction with state-owned enterprises is much lower than that with private competitors, a fact mainly attributed to the formers’ poor service quality. Marketing strategies for state-owned enterprises should concentrate on employee-related service quality attributes. In the short-run, ability-related attributes can be improved through effective standardized operating procedures, employee training and sufficient manpower. In the long run, attitude-related attributes can be transformed through a customer-oriented culture.