Exploration of Product Centric Factors in Telecom Industry

Purpose
Telecom industry is one of those industries which has changed dramatically during the past decade. With more and more players entering in this industry, competition is ever increasing. The war between these players is slowly shifting from the price to the augmentation. This paper aims at exploring such factors which influence a customer's preference of one telecom service provider (TSP) over the other. It is a descriptive research where study has been conducted among the consumers of different telecom service providers (TSPs).

Design/methodology/approach
By reviewing the existing literature in this domain, we explored different factors which affect the consumer's decision to prefer one telecom service provider over the other. A consumer targeted questionnaire was designed where consumers were asked about the factors they consider (with their relative importance quantified using Likert scale), before buying a new network connection to know the relative importance of the various factors. Factor Analysis was performed to club various variables into distinct factors. Statistical techniques then helped in identifying the relative importance.

Findings
From the Factor Loading matrix the following five factors were generated:- Overall service quality, Point of Purchase Differentiator, Promotion Measures, Tariff Plans and Size of the Network. Further study in the behavioural perceptions of consumer shows that the most important factor in influencing the customer buying behavior is Service Quality. The second most important factor is cost and various plans offered by the telecom service provider. Network connectivity was considered by almost all the respondents and consumers prefer the largest network player. The study also found that promotional measures don't influence the customers as expected.