Determinants of Customer Satisfaction in Pakistan Telecommunication

Customer satisfaction is a fundamental marketing construct over the last three decades. It the past a less attention was given to the customer satisfaction as companies gave more importance to attract new customers than retaining the existing customers. However presently companies focus on the customer satisfaction especially in the service producing companies and set it as high priority operational goals. Thus, this study is an effort to identify the factors influencing the customer satisfaction in Pakistan telecommunication industry along with the mediating role of the service quality. A well-structured questionnaire was distributed among the customers of four leading telecommunication companies operating in Pakistan. Results showed that switching cost have significant negative influence on the customer satisfaction that means that if a company have higher switching cost barriers people are hesitate to use their services. Because of these barriers people think that if in future they want to move to other services they need to bear not only economic cost but also the social cost. Thus, customer hesitate to use such services that have higher switching cost. This study is important for the practitioners as well. As this study gives them idea how they can satisfy their customer and what things they supposed to do to retain the customers for the long run. They must invest more and more in their customer relationship management department to fix out their customer problems on spot and to utilized that data to make things better to make it sure that such kind of problems will not face by the rest of the customers. The study concluded that if companies have focus on the better customer relationship management, their service quality is getting more and more better that ultimately satisfy the customer and keep them for long time period.