Understanding business customer behaviour retention strategies for BSNL

Abstract

Customer retention is one of the dormant areas of marketing management, which though is very vital for organizations; generally organizations tend to focus on acquisition of new customers which may be prudent for increasing the top line of a company. However retention of customer for large incumbent operators is very much essential to maintain their bottom line. In Indian scenario much of the telecom marketing is focused on acquisition on new customers, the focus companies is on corporate customers to whom personal attention can be provided by telecom companies. However many small business customers contribute significant revenues to telecom service providers to whom clear retention strategies except tariff reduction do not exist. Focus of this dissertation is to understand the behavior these business customers to develop appropriate retention strategies. The research focuses on the study of customers of BSNL which is the leading telecom service provider in India. The research focuses on to measure various aspects of customer behavior. Customer billing data is used for classification of customers using loyalty pyramid. Interviews are conducted on a structured questionnaire to cover various segments of loyalty pyramid. Modified service gap model is used for finding discrepancy between customer expectations and service delivery. The multi measurement technique followed would narrow down the research and try to limit the costly mistakes that organizations commit by undertaking one type of measurement. The method can be adopted by telecom service providers and other service organizations who are in competitive field. The purpose of this thesis is to build customer retention strategies for BSNL, organization in which the researcher is employed. As an incumbent player a good marketing strategy for BSNL is to improve customer loyalty and to increase sales thru existing customers by either selling new services to them or use their benevolent word of mouth buzz for selling services to other customers. This research study has short listed variables like service levels, response, equity, inertia and other variables which make significant impact on customer loyalty.