A study on service quality and customer satisfaction in mobile phone services

Elecommunication industry, especially Mobile phone services, is going through a high speed growth trajectory, worldwide as well as in India. It is one of the most happening places today. More and more technological features and conveniences are added to the ever growing subscriber base, which stands at more than 50crores in India, with certain states like Kerala reporting ateledensity of nearly 90%!. With the call charges continuously dropping and ARPU (average revenue per user) one of the lowest in the world, Indian cellular operators are faced with the double challenge of economic operation and customer retention. Within the basic marketing premise that a happy customer is a loyal customer, these companies are trying to improve the service delivery so as to make the customer satisfied. In this context it becomes necessary to periodically check the satisfaction level of existing customers and try to plug any holes in the service quality delivery. The situation becomes more complex with the introduction of Mobile number portability (which means a dissatisfied customer need not, will not wait for the company to recover the service failures), sharing of infrastructure between firms, use of multiple SIM cards, epayment services and vast majority of customers switching over to Pre-paid connections etc. ISO 9000:2000 also mandates periodic study of customer satisfaction and management interventions. This study tries to analyse customer satisfaction as an antecedent to the customer perception- expectation gap proposed in the SERVQUAL model on various service quality dimensions and attributes and the prioritizing of these dimensions by the customers. The influence of these dimensions on overall satisfaction is also studied. It also gives a SWOT analysis of firms under study, socio-economic profile of mobile phone users today, their behavioral patterns and an analysis of common problems faced by customers