Satisfaction and protection of individual mobile telecommunications consumers

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to measure customer satisfaction among private individual consumers of mobile telecommunications in Spain and the factors associated with this. Two novelties found in this paper are a focus on individual consumers and the usage of rich data to convey high quality statistical information. Our data allow us to discriminate by operator, region of residence (Autonomous Regions and provinces), gender, age, and educational level, among others. Specifically, we formulate relationships between different aspects of satisfaction and its determinants. We specify econometric models and estimate them using survey data on 4,953 individual consumers. Our results indicate that customers are less satisfied with larger carriers like Movistar and Vodafone, and are more satisfied with smaller and newer operators. We also measure the contribution of each of the aspects of satisfaction to the overall satisfaction by specifying individual equations for each one of them and estimating the importance of each of its determinants. Complaints about billing, difficulty in obtaining the required information and coverage are the major contributors to consumer (dis)satisfaction.