Comparing customer satisfaction with China mobile and China telecom services: An empirical study

Abstract

This paper aims to examine and compare customer satisfaction towards China Mobile and China Telecom’s services. The literature suggests factors such as customer services, price, network quality, and product diversity influence customers’ satisfaction with telecommunications organizations. This study employs the judgment sampling method, which is limited to specific people who can provide the desired information since the respondents are confined to customers who subscribed to the services of either China Mobile or China Telecom. A self-reporting questionnaire was developed and disseminated to 500 respondents in which 472 completed copies were returned. The results indicate that all of the influencing factors are significantly and positively correlated with overall satisfaction of China Mobile and China Telecom’s customers. However, satisfaction seems to be higher among China Mobile’s customers in terms of product diversity, while better customer service is recorded among China Telecom’s customers. The findings suggest that the telecommunications service providers should develop appropriate strategies based on their strengths in satisfying their customers as well as overcoming their weaknesses by learning from each other. With network quality and customer service identified as the major factors influencing customer satisfaction, strategies should be formulated along these two areas. Both telecommunications service providers cannot ignore the importance of product diversity and pricing as these factors scored strong correlations with customer satisfaction. China Mobile, which seems to possess the advantage of product diversity, can further enhance its offerings to attract younger users. China Telecom, on the other hand, can take the opportunity to determine what it needs to offer to be on par with China Mobile as it is evident that customers are more satisfied with the latter’s services. This paper focuses on a small sample size and that by using the outcome instead of process approach to test the model might raise the issue of generalizability in which future studies should address. Nevertheless, this study has advanced knowledge for it has provided information on the current state of customer satisfaction with the People’s Republic of China’s telecommunications organizations. It has confirmed the factors which significantly influence customer satisfaction with both China Mobile and China Telecom which are beneficial to the telecommunications service providers as they craft strategies towards increased mobile service use in the future.