Title: Customer retention to mobile telecommunication service providers: the roles of perceived justice and customer loyalty program

Authors: Nedra Bahri-Ammari; Anil Bilgihan

Addresses: Department of Marketing, IHEC, Carthage, 2016, Tunisia ' Department of Marketing, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, 33431, USA

Abstract: In the past decade, the competition has increased in mobile telecommunication services; moreover, a stagnating rate of diffusion suggests that the market may have reached maturity. Thus, customer loyalty has become an important area of research in the mobile telecommunication sector. The goal of this current study is to offer and test a theoretical model of customer retention in the mobile telecommunication context. To test the theoretical model, a self-administrated questionnaire was developed and tested on a sample of 400 customers. The results show that greater levels of satisfaction toward loyalty program lead to greater customer retention. The satisfaction of loyalty program positively impacts customer relationship satisfaction. The mediating effect of relationship satisfaction is supported. Since the majority of research on perceived justice focused on service recovery and complaint outcomes, this framework provides empirical evidence on the direct and indirect effect of procedural, distributive and interactional perceived justice regarding loyalty programs as antecedents of relational satisfaction loyalty/commitment and retention from a consumer's perspective.

Keywords: mobile communication; loyalty programs; perceived justice; satisfaction; retention; SEM; structural equation modelling; emerging economy countries.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2019.096518

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2019 Vol.17 No.1, pp.82 - 107

Received: 14 Nov 2016
Accepted: 25 Sep 2017
Published online: 05 Dec 2018 *

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