User satisfaction with cellular mobile telecom services

Abstract

India has become one of the fastest growing Mobile Markets in the world. The spectacular growth of Mobile Telephony is mainly due to innovations in the wireless technologies that lead to reduction in the cost of the equipment as well as hand sets and availability of large number of Service Providers. With the number Service Providers in the Market, there is a stiff competition among the Mobile operators to retain their existing Customers apart from the Acquiring new Customers. This competition drives the Cellular Operators to identify the factors affecting the Customer Loyalty that leads to combination of Repurchase likelihood services from the current Service Provider and Price tolerance towards the services. Although, National Customer Satisfaction Indices Models are developed in several countries for bench marking, comparing and enhancing Customer Satisfaction across organizations, Industries and countries, no standardized National Index Model has been developed in India so far to apply to specific industry like Cellular Mobiles in India. Therefore this research attempts to develop a standardized model specific to Cellular Industry based on the Customer Satisfaction Index models already available in SWEDEN, U.S.A and E.U to identify the major factors affecting the behavior of Cellular phone Users, to benchmark the Service Providers of Cellular Mobile services in India and comparing the performance of Cellular Industry in India with Other Countries. Results of the study suggest that all the Model Constructs are having positive relation between them. These results demonstrate the importance of service quality parameters of cellular services like coverage of service, reliability of service, tariff of the services provided, billing facilities, customer friendly services, accessibility of the vendor services and availability of variety of value added services and showed that Customer satisfaction depends on the customer s perceived level of quality delivered. This study found that there is a significant difference in perception about Customer Satisfaction and Price Tolerance between Prepaid and Postpaid Customers. It is noticed that Prepaid Customers are more satisfied than the Postpaid Customers. Finally, based on the research model Customer satisfaction index is calculated for the Cellular Industry and is found to be low compared to Customer Satisfaction Indices of other countries. In sum, this model provides the useful insights to policy makers and regulators for evaluating the performance of Service Providers and Cellular Industry and for Service Providers for quantifying the Customer satisfaction levels at various regions and to know the reasons for Customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.