A Study on Customer Profiling of Mobile Phone Service Providers in Emerging Markets — Case of Kolkata, India

India is considered to be one of the fastest growing markets for mobile phones. The National target plan was to have a 250 million subscriber base by December 2007 (DOT Annual report 2006–2007). Primarily, which was a mode of fashion and status in the urban rich of the society, is fast changing its role as a convenient networking tool and penetrating in to all parts of the society including urban poor and even to rich rural class. Mobile phone service providers play a major role in satisfying needs of customers. It is becoming increasingly important for the companies to understand the changing customers' need, attitude and behaviour towards mobile phone services in order to compete efficiently which may lead to higher market share. Past researches focused extensively on measuring consumer perception of quality and determinants of service quality (Parasuraman et al., 1988, etc.). Cronin and Taylor (1992, 1994) have investigated the conceptualization and measurement of service quality and suggested relationships among service quality, consumer satisfaction and purchase intentions. It was Gronroos in 1990, who mentioned about importance of flexibility as one of the determinants of service quality, which may be considered as extremely valuable determinant in the face of future expectations from mobile phone service providers. The objective of the present study was to understand the nature and importance of generic requirements, functional quality, flexibility, and price which may generate satisfaction in the minds of customers of mobile phone service providers. A survey was conducted with a sample of 277 respondents from the city of Kolkata, where 19 items were selected to measure their importance and attitudes towards the current brand of service providers. Suitable multivariate techniques were applied to infer important determinants of customer satisfaction and possible segmentations.