Abstract:
Sri Lankan telecommunication industry is fast growing and there are several operators
engaged in huge competition, and also newcomers are coming into the market in the
recent past. In this context, the competition is increasing and market growth is reaching
the saturation in the operators' perspective. They need to sustain their customers and at
the same time to attract other customers. Due to the rapidly growing and intensive
competition of the mobile communication market and the fast-tracking customer
sophistication, the bargaining power of customers in switching service providers has been
a benefited option rather than being loyal to one subscriber. In this study, the researcher
attempted to find the influencing factors of customer switching behavior in the Sri Lankan
telecommunication market. This study aims to reveal why customers switch from one
operator to another, what are the determents factors of their behaviors, and to identify the
service quality failures impacted on switching in the local market. Referring to previous
literature it was found that core service failure, services encounter failures, service
responds failures are the main determents of costomer switching and the research design
was developed considering those factors. The sample of the study was mobile users in the
Kandy and Nuwara-Eliya who have switched among mobile connections from all leading
networks. The sampling method was random sampling and sample size of 200 customers
were selected from both districts. Primary data were collected through a selfadministrative questionnaire and secondary data were also collected. Data analysis were
done through SPSS 16.0. According to data analysis, results showed a positive
relationship between the service quality failures and customer switching behavior in the
Sri Lankan telecommunication market.
Keywords: Service quality, Customer switching behavior
