A STUDY ON THE FACTORS AFFECTING ON MOBILE USERS’ SWITCHING BEHAVIOR TOWARDS MOBILE SERVICE PROVIDERS OF WESTERN PROVINCE IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

The world is becoming more competitive with the growing of the technology and competition has become a part of the telecommunication industry. With competition, customer switching has become a popular topic in the business world. The Sri Lankan telecommunication industry has high competition due to only five mobile service providers are operating in the industry. In order to retain their current customers, service providers must understand customer switching behavior. With the initially conducted preliminary survey, it was revealed that mobile users who are in the age category of 16-35 years have high switching behaviors towards mobile service providers in Western province in Sri Lanka. Therefore, the objective of the current study was to investigate the factors impact on mobile users who are in the age category of 16-35 years have high switching behaviors towards mobile service providers in Western province in Sri Lanka. The data was collected from 500 mobile service users through selfadministered questionnaire using convenience sampling technique. The study was found that Pricing, Inconvenience, Core Service Failure, Employee Responsiveness to Service Failure, Attraction by Competitors and Change in Technology have significant positive impact on customer switching behavior. And Switching Cost and Service Encounter Failure do not impact on customer switching behavior in Sri Lankan telecommunication industry. The outcomes of the study will help the management of mobile service providers in making decisions to retain their current customers and attract new customers from competitors