Essay About Customer Satisfaction And Service Quality

The Relationship Between Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in the Telecommunication Industry: Evidence from Nigeria
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the telecommunication industry with a focus on Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN)
Nigeria. A total of 230 respondents participated in the study. Research questions and objectives
were set, alongside the hypotheses that were formulated and tested. Descriptive statistics
comprising the simple percentage and tables were used for data presentation and analysis.
Regression analysis and Pearson product moment correlation coefficient were employed in testing
our hypotheses. The study reveals that service quality has effect on customer satisfaction and that
there is a positive relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction. The researcher
concluded by recommending that organisations should focus more attention on service quality,
because of its effects on customer satisfaction. To ensure that customer satisfaction level is high,
organisation must first of all know the expectations of the customers and how they can meet such
expectations. Customer satisfaction helps in customer loyalty and retention. It has been discovered
that it costs to attract new customer than to retain existing ones. It is also recommended that
organisations should welcome suggestions from customers and more programmes should be
designed to measure service quality and customer satisfaction.
Keywords: Customer, Service, Customer Satisfaction, Service Quality, Customer Loyalty.
1. Introduction
Service quality today has become not only the rhetoric of every business enterprise, but also
occupies eminent position in every discourse. No business organisation can survive without
building its customer satisfaction and brand loyalty; likewise no organisation can make a healthy
living without meeting the needs of its customers. That is what organisations do: they serve peoples
needs. Service quality helps in cementing the relationship between customers and the organisation
and it is a two-way flow of value. This means that customer derives real value from the relationship
which translate into value for the organisation in the form of enhanced profitability and
sustainability over a long period of time.
A number of empirical studies have been conducted on the subject of service quality and
customer satisfaction (Cronin and Taylor, 1992; Spreng and Mackoy, 1996; Jones and Suh, 2000;
Coyles and Gokey, 2002; Ranaweera and Prabhu, 2003; Choi et al., 2004). Research on this subject
shows that most of the studies were conducted in industrialised countries such as United State, the
United Kingdom, and Japan. This implies that there is dearth of relevant literature on
underdeveloped and developing countries, including Nigeria which has to be covered by research.
In addition, despite the existence of these studies, very little attention has been given to the
communication industry. This means that the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction in
the communication industry has not received adequate research attention in Nigeria. Thus, there is a
major gap in the relevant literature on Nigeria, which has to be covered by research. This research
attempts to fill this gap by studying the situation of the Nigerian telecommunication industry and
providing more empirical evidence on the effects of service quality on customer satisfaction. It is
BRAND. Broad Research in Accounting, Negotiation, and Distribution
ISSN 2067-8177, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
against this backdrop that this study tries to answer three major research questions: (i) Does
customer service have a relationship with service quality perception? (ii) Does customer service
have a relationship with customer satisfaction? (iii) Does customer satisfaction have a relationship
with service quality perception? In order to address the above questions, we work on these
objectives: (i) to determine the relationship between customer service and perceived service quality.
(ii) to determine the relationship between customer service and customer satisfaction. (iii) to
determine the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction. (iv) to investigate the
strategies utilised by an organisation to deliver exceptional service quality and customer satisfaction
through customer service. In addition, three hypotheses were formulated to guide the researcher in
the conduct of this study. They are: (i) H1: Customer service has effect on quality perception. (ii) H1:
Customer service has effect on customer satisfaction. (iii) H1: There is a relationship between
customer satisfaction and quality perception.
2. Review of Literature
This section dwells on the theoretical and systematic analysis of documents containing
information about the research problem on customer service. It is the relation of the existing
literature on the research topic to the study and thus defines the boundary of this article.
2.1 Service quality
The definition of quality may vary from person to person