thesis

Chapter 5:

Conclusion

This study aims to find out the customer satisfaction of the telecommunication industry by apply the CRM, the factor influencing the satisfaction and the relationship between demographic variable and customer satisfaction in Pakistan.

The customer satisfaction is an experience based assessment made by customer on how far their expectations about the service given by the mobile company and has been fulfilled by the mobile company.

With regards to customer satisfaction measurement, the results demonstrated that customers are satisfied with the performance of the Nigerian mobile telecoms industry. The interpretation of this result could be that Nigerian customers are truly satisfied with the service performance (satisfied with experience of the mobile services use) or their satisfaction results from lack of competing services or it could be that the customers are new to satisfaction measurement and may not be able to express their perceptions well. The result also demonstrated that customer satisfaction level differs among the specific demographic groups. Within the age groups, the older customers were more satisfied than younger ones. The low satisfaction of the young customers could be due to greater familiarity with mobile technologies and are more demanding. The male customers showed more satisfaction than the female counterpart. The high satisfaction of the male customers could be due to the impact of the services on their functional activities. The unemployed customers demonstrated more satisfaction than the employed ones and the higher satisfaction of the unemployed group could be due to true satisfaction or low knowledge of mobile technologies. Lastly, the low-income areas showed more satisfaction than the high-income areas. The low satisfaction of high-income areas customers could probably be due to greater familiarity with information technologies and are more demanding. However, mobile operators need to strive to maximize customer satisfaction which in turn can influence the extent of loyalty and retention.

With regards to factors that influence satisfaction, network quality demonstrated a strong influence on customer satisfaction. The implication of this finding is that network quality is the most significant of all the mobile services attributes and its quality strongly affect satisfaction. Billing, validity period and customer support showed weak influence on satisfaction. These results indicate that the evaluation of these factors without alignment is meaningless and have weak impact on satisfaction. The result also demonstrated that the combination of the mobile services attributes has strong influence on satisfaction. Thus, to increase customer satisfaction, mobile operators should focus on improving mobile services attributes by investing in equipment to enhance call quality and coverage, offer reasonable pricing and price discounts, offer reasonable validity period and enhance customer care through routine personnel training and provision of better customer-friendly equipment.

With regards to influence of demographic variables on satisfaction, the result showed that the individual variables (age, gender, employment status and location) and their combination have weak influence on satisfaction. These results mean that customers perceptions of how well the mobile services meet their needs are not affected by these specific variables. However, since the results showed different customer satisfaction levels among the various demographic groups, mobile operators can strive to better understand these market segments and adopt marketing strategies to better satisfy their different needs.

Broadly, the implication of this study for mobile operators is that operators should not just rely on profit margins as a good indicator of business performance. Rather, they should develop strategies that better capture customers perceptions of their service offerings and these strategies can compliment the internal perceptions of service offering. Customer satisfaction strategy helps companies to compare their performance against customer standards, compare customer standards against internal process and identify opportunities for improvement.

Despite the potential contribution of this study, this study had four limitations. First, the questionnaire was self-constructed instead of adopting research standard such as SERQUAL and this made analysis difficult and affected the reliability of the result. Second, convenience data sample was used in this study and employment of random sample is necessary to judge the generalizability of findings of any empirical investigation.  Thirdly, the different locations of authors and interviewers made supervision impossible and this robbed this study of potential probe for any useful information. Lastly, lack of customer satisfaction study in Nigeria. This lack robbed this study of possible comparism and insight.

With respect future projects, there is need for cooperation between academic bodies and mobile operators so as to achieve better customer-oriented investigations. Future studies can further investigate the factors that affect satisfaction and loyalty (such as level of education, word of mouth, life cycles and usage pattern of customers, switching barriers, etc).