Service Quality Dimensions and Customers' Satisfactions in Mobile Communications

Abstract

Objective - The world is moving towards continuous and ubiquitous availability of information. Entry of private operators in 1990's, competition has caused prices to drop and calls across India are one of the cheapest in the world. Technological advances combined with forces of globalization resulted in the transformation of the economy, industries, markets and customers resulting in a connected knowledge economy, borderless global economy, globalizing, covering and consolidating industries, fragmenting and frictionless markets and active, connected, informed and demanding customers. The objective of this research is to ascertain the constructs like customer satisfaction towards the mobile phone service providers, switching barrier and the customer loyalty factors. Methodology/Technique - Respondents in the study are the customers who use mobile phones. Primary data were collected with the help of the specially designed questionnaire, which was administered to the mobile users. The final questionnaire was pre-tested on 40 respondents and the coefficient values are all above .8 thus meeting Nunnaly's recommendation of greater than 0.7 as the acceptable reliability level. The overall alpha value was 0.8 and the instrument consists of customer satisfaction regarding the mobile service providers, which includes factors like price (5 items, 0.816), network coverage (4 items, 0.795), customer service (5 items, 0.852) and usage (8 items, 0.884). Switching barriers factors consists of 28 items like credibility factors (8 items, 0.863), congruency factors (7 items, 0.816), switching cast (8 items, 0.871), and value (5 items, 0.900). Final part of the instrument includes 17 customer loyalty factors like trust (7 items, 0.858), commitment (4 items, 0.848), word of mouth (3 items, 0.779) and cooperation (3 items, 0.691). Findings - Gender, location of the customers and service providers has a significant association with level of customer satisfaction. Gender and occupation have a significant association with level of customer switching barriers. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze the main effect and the adjustment effect of those switching barrier factors and the relative effect. The contribution is that this study reviews theoretically and verifies empirically the relationship and mechanism between the customer retention and the switching barrier. Type of Paper - Empirical Keywords: Customer satisfaction factors; switching barrier factors; Customer loyalty factors.