Brand loyalty of customers towards mobile telephone service providers in India – An empirical analysis

Telecom services have been recognized throughout the world over as an important tool for socio-economic development of a nation. It is one of the prime support services needed for rapid growth and modernisation of various sectors of the economy. India is currently the world's second-largest telecommunications market and has registered exceptional growth in the past few years. The markets for mobile telephone service providers in India tend to become more and more competitive in the current scenario. Moreover the usage of such services is found to have penetrated almost all economic and social sectors. It is therefore mandatory to identify the key attributes that contribute towards building up brand loyalty of customers in the mobile telephone services sector. The rationale of this paper is to explore the factors that influence customer loyalty so that it will be helpful for the mobile service providers to concentrate more on such attributes. Based on the reviews of previous researches undertaken in this regard some of the key factors that contribute towards loyalty of customers in the mobile telecom services sector have been identified. Predominant players in India in mobile telecom services like Airtel, Docomo, MTN, BSNL, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Aircel were taken for the study. The research design that is adopted for the study is descriptive and the study relies both on primary and secondary dat. Primary Data are collected through a well structured questionnaire. The questionnaires were analysed using SPSS 16 and Pearson correlation was used to establish the relationship between the dependent and independent variables. Data were collected from the subscribers of all the mobile telecom providers. The sample size was determined using a pilot study and responses were collected from 388 respondents. The sampling method that is adopted is convenience sampling which is a non-probability sampling technique. The results identified call rate/quality, network coverage and sales promotion as having significant positive relationship to customer loyalty. In addition, brand image and prompt customer service were seen to have a less effect on customer loyalty. As customer retention is critical for strategists in dynamic world of telecommunication sector. So it is important for operators to devise well-structured customer loyalty programs for protecting the customers’ base line.