Slater’s (1997) proposed ‘‘customer value-based theory concept’’
suggests that the central organizational challenge of a firm is to maximize
the effectiveness of the firm’s customer value creation activities.
While Porter (1980) suggests that superior performance requires a
firm to possess a competitive advantage (Slater, 1997), these challenges
are the driving force for firms to provide supplementary services
to differentiate their service products since all core services are
basically the same across service providers.