SERVICE QUALITY AND CUSTOMERS SATISFACTION IN THE NIGERIAN TELECOMMUNICATION INDUSTRY

ABSTRACT

This study examines service quality and customer satisfaction in Nigeria telecommunication industry. In this study, a total number of 400 questionnaires were administered by the researcher, and we obtained 83.5% response rate. Data collected were analyzed with statistical packages for social sciences (SPSS) 24.0 using the descriptive statistics of frequency distribution of the responses and regression technique. The result shows that tangibility, responsiveness, empathy, assurance and reliability has a positive impact on customer’s perception of the quality of service provided by service firms in the Nigerian telecommunication industry. It was discovered that in relation to the overall rating of service provided by telecommunication industry in Nigeria, MTN was chosen by respondents to be the highest most preferred network because it has the highest ranking index. This study also reveals that the common causes of customers dissatisfaction with the services provided by firms in the Nigerian telecommunication industry are unnecessary charges/airtime deduction, browsing network difficulties, call network difficulties, exorbitant call charges, browsing network difficulties, recharging issues, poor customer care services and exorbitant data charge. In testing for research hypotheses, a positive and statistically significant relationship was found to exist between customer satisfaction and the service quality provided by MTN, Glo, Airtel firms except 9mobile because the p-value was not statistically significant at 5%. While customer perception was found not to vary with demographic variables such as age, sex, faculty and level. It was recommended that mobile telecommunication service providers should focus more attention on service quality because of its close knit relationship with customer satisfaction also their staff should encourage and welcome suggestions on improving customer satisfaction.