FACTORS AFFECTING CUSTOMER LOYALTY FOR MOBILE SERVICE PROVIDERS

Intense competition in the mobile services market encourages these service providers to take measures to create, maintain and enhance consumer loyalty. In such a concentrated market, it becomes important for service providers to identify and enhance the factors determining customer loyalty and their expression, whereas maintaining existing users requires significantly less effort and financial, human and time resources than attracting new ones. This article deals with a case study of Lithuania’s mobile operators: UAB “Bitė Lietuva”, UAB “Tele2”, UAB “Telia” in the context of consumer loyalty. The paper raises the question of what factors influence mobile phone user loyalty and how these factors can be evaluated. The article presents theoretical analysis of factors determining consumer loyalty in the service sector. An expert evaluation and multi-criteria study reveals which loyalty factors have the strongest influence on customers of mobile operators when choosing a particular service provider in Lithuania. The relevance of this article has potential for a practical study of consumer loyalty factors in the future. In the future, the research may be continued on a larger scale, involving more companies in the telecommunications sector, choosing research methods that are suitable for a broader sample of research and formulating consumer loyalty enhancement solutions applicable exclusively to organizations in the industry.

Elemental Modularity Design in Smart Phones

Current statistics show that there are around 2.53 billion smartphone users on this Earth in 2018, which is predicted to rise upto 2.87 billion by 2020. Since the birth of the mobile phone in 1940s, the development in the technology was driven by technological advancements. Now, there is a factor of the social movement that partially drives the innovation in the phone technology, catering the subjective “ease of access” of maximum users. An average mobile phone user is spending around 3.1 hours per day on a phone i.e. 93 hours in a month which explains why there is a need of considering social trends along with technological innovation while designing the product. But taking everything into account, the past few innovations in the mobile phone industry were noticeably constrained to a few monotonous principles, and hence arises a need for revolution. One revolution in the software industry was initialized by the open source movement which points towards a theory for solving this tediousness in the hardware industry and paves ways for concepts like modular phones. Modularity means the degree to which a system’s components can be separated and reassembled hence a modular phone is a smartphone in which different functional pieces can be swapped out. The concept promotes open sourcing movement in hardware sector and increases the complexity of the system but decreases the sophistication for the end user. This paper will demonstrate modularity as a concept, its present and future scope and an experiment-based hypothesis to create a generic modular phone based on any OS.

Saliva - A New Horizon for Estimating Antioxidant Profile of Mobile Phone User

This is the era of information and new technologies, among the brilliant inventions and advancement, Global system of mobile phone communication (GSM) makes the life as approachable as one can think. It changes the social relation and social network of an individual. Hence the mobile has two sides of a coin. Advantages and disadvantages are associated with every feasibility or inventions. But some time blessings bring some harmful effects on the human body. Mobile phone uses radio waves. Some part of the radio wave is also absorbed in the body. The ear is the most exposed part of the body. The salivary gland is very close to the ear. Hence, the affected part of the cellular phone radiations is a salivary gland. In the current study, we collected the unstimulated saliva sample from volunteers to estimate the antioxidant profile of the mobile phone user. The Uric acids, Catalase, C Reactive Protein (CRP), Reduced Glutathione (GSH), and Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) were included in the antioxidant profile. Uric acid, GSH, SOD was significantly decreased while CRP and Catalase were significantly increased. The result shows the increase the risk of inflammation and oxidative stress, which can predispose the cell phone user to a multitude of infectious & non-infectious oral diseases.

Position Independent Mobile User Authentication Using Keystroke Dynamics

In this chapter, a novel technique to authenticate a mobile phone user irrespective of his/her typing position is presented. The user is never always in sitting position while using mobile phone. Thus, it becomes very important to check the accuracy of keystroke dynamics technique while taking input in all positions but authenticating the user irrespective of these positions. Three user positions were considered for input – sitting, walking, and relaxed. The input was taken in uncontrolled environment to get realistic results. Hold time, latency, and motion features using accelerometer data were extracted, and the analysis was done using random forest and KNN classifiers. The accelerometer data provides additional features like mean of all X, Y, and Z axis values. The inclusion of these features improved the results drastically and played a very significant role in determining the user typing behavior. An EER of 4.3% was achieved with a best FAR of 0.9% and an FRR of 15.2%.