Customer Perceptions of Service Quality, Satisfaction and Loyalty in Mobile Telecommunications

Customer experience is increasingly valued as a critical factor for long-term competitive positioning in saturated mobile telecommunications markets. As the operational differences become increasingly non-existent and technology barriers are smaller, customer satisfaction levels, product quality, and value perception contribute to loyalty and long-term performance. Recent scientific literature has focused on integrative models of customer satisfaction, which illustrate that customers’ loyalty is determined by their perception of quality, perceived value, and satisfaction in a multi-faceted manner, especially in high-technology service industries. Nevertheless, there is little empirical data from the mobile telecommunications markets in developing European economies. This research utilises a quantitative research design comprising a cross-sectional research to analyze the relationships among perceived service quality, perceived value, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty within a telecom business. Data were collected from 300 customers of a leading mobile operator via an online survey with an adapted questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, internal consistency analysis, exploratory factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, and multiple regression models. In this analysis, the relationship between perceived service quality and perceived satisfaction as well as loyalty is well indicated and the multidimensional structure of perceived service quality is confirmed. The perceived value stands out as the most significant factor for customer satisfaction, while customer satisfaction is identified as the strongest predictive agent for customer loyalty. The strong internal reliability measures that have been established confirm that the measurement instrument is relatively reliable. These results provide further support for the soundness of these integrated customer satisfaction concepts which validate the usefulness of integrated customer satisfaction models in this particular sector and are valuable for operators better to optimize customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty and to offer support to operators who wish to improve the customer experience and loyalty in digital markets.