Ranking the strategic actions of Iran mobile cellular telecommunication using two models of fuzzy QFD

Mobile cellular telecommunication success in target markets first requires ranking the customer’s expectations and then prioritizing the engineering characteristics (ECs) to meet the expectations. In this paper, two prioritization models based on quality function deployment (QFD) are developed to rank the strategic actions (SAs), or the ECs of Iran mobile cellular telecommunication. QFD is a widely used customer-driven tool for which the success of its applications may be the result of some of its benefits, such as greater customer focus. It uses a matrix called House of Quality (HOQ) to translate Customer Attributes (CAs) into ECs. However, due to the high degree of subjectivity in constructing the HOQ, the application of fuzzy logic provides an efficient tool to handle the subjective assessments. On the other hand, taking into consideration the gap between the current state and the positive ideal state for each CA, TOPSIS is used to rank CAs in a first model. In addition, in a second model, using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), more criteria are taken into consideration in ranking CAs. Also, a fuzzy utility factor, Bj, is used to rank SAs in both models. Both presented models have the ability to capture the vagueness of human thinking style, and let customer oriented organizations, such as MCI, derive benefits from the voice of the customer (VOC) in a more expressive way.