Service quality & customer satisfaction: an empirical study of code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phones services under the post war situation in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Customer Satisfaction is a fundamental marketing construct in the last three decades. In the past, it was unpopular concept of Organizations that were operating in the war-tone area. The companies thought it was more important to gain new customers than retain the existing ones. However, in this present situation, companies have gained better understanding of the importance of customer satisfaction (especially service producing companies) and few companies have adopted it as a high priority operational goal. Service quality has been viewed as a dominant force of Customer Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction leads to Customer loyalty. Hence, the purpose of the research is to identify the factors of Service Quality of CDMA mobile phone services that generate Satisfaction in Trincomalee, Divisional Secretariat Division, Sri Lanka. The constructs and dimensions of this model were developed from the literature review, and pre developed and tested scale was used to measure the dimensions. This mode) is an attempt to investigate and accesses six different construct which suppose to create customer satisfaction. Six hypotheses were developed and tested based on data collected using structured questionnaire from 341 randomly selected end user customers of CDMA mobile phone services in Trincomalee, DS Division. The data analysed using statistical analysis with SPSS 13.0 version, and regression and correlation analysis were done. The result revealed that price was the most influencing factor to Customer Satisfaction among other factors such as tangible, reliability, assurance, responsiveness and Empathy. However responsiveness and assurance too substantially contributed to customer satisfaction towards CDMA services. The research was significant (R2 is 0.826). The results of the hypothesis test, all the hypothesis were supported and substantiated to this study.