Factors Influencing State Sector Employees' Loyalty Towards Mobitel "Upahara" Package

Abstract

The mobile telecommunication industry in Sri Lanka has been changed drastically since last years. Due to high competition customer retention has become a critical issue in the success of mobile telecommunication business. Hence the mobile service providers consider building customer loyalty by introducing customer loyalty programmes. As well as telecom customers prefer tailored or customized services and rewards. Due to that reasons, as a well- known service provider Mobitel introduced ‘Upahara’ post-paid package with the aim of providing offerings to meet the unique communication needs of the state sector employees. But there is a fall in activation of ‘Upahara’ post-paid package during last couple of years. Therefore the objective of this study is to examine the factors impact on state sector employees’ loyalty towards Upahara post-paid package. The study consists with five independent variables such as economic rewards, hedonist rewards, convenience rewards, information rewards, recognition and social relationship rewards and one dependant variable called customer loyalty. This is a quantitative based study where the structured questionnaires manually distributed among the employees who are working in Ministry of Education ‘Isurupaya’ premises employing convenience sampling technique. Correlation and regression analysis were performed to analyse the hypotheses. The findings revealed that there is positive and significant impact of economic rewards,recognition and social relationship rewards,convenience rewards on state sector employees’ loyalty towards Upahara post- paid package. As well as informationa rewards and hedonist rewards do not impact on state sector employees’ loyalty towards Upahara post-paid package. The recognition and social relationship rewards has recognized as most influential factor. Hence,this study provide guidance for mobile service providers in designing loyalty programmes to the state sector employees.