Summary of document 3

Document 3 was tailored to explore the perspectives and reasons behind defection of consumers from STC using qualitative research. The essence of the focus group interviews was to identify the main issues that would feature in the questionnaire development process. A group of 10 participants that had defected fully or partially were selected from the STC billing register and focus group interviews comprising all 10 participants together were conducted. At the conclusion of the exercise reported in Document 3, a principal outcome was a structured questionnaire developed from the responses of the interviewees. The questionnaire developed as an outcome of the qualitative findings reported in Document 3 was progressively used as the data collection tool for the findings reported in both Document 4 and Document 5 (the current document).

The actions arising to identify the attributes and the associated reasons for defection needed a group of fully and partially defected mobile subscribers to be established. A list of one hundred subscribers covering a wide range of customer profiles were randomly identified from STC’s customer care and billing system, ICMS (Integrated Customer Management System). The researcher shortlisted fifty defected customers by closely looking into their location, education, profession, age, social, and economic background to proportionately cover all subscriber groups. Considering the proximity of participants, all members were chosen from Riyadh. In the middle of November 2007, these fifty potential participants were individually called by phone and briefly explained the purpose of the research study and expected commitment level to find out their initial willingness to participate. Thirty of them expressed their enthusiasm to participate and five could not be reached by phone. The researcher individually met each of the potential participants and based on the availability of the members and their level of commitment to the research, came up with a list of ten active members. A tentative list of five other members was made in case any of the ten members dropped out for reasons beyond their control.

The approach was to meet the members individually twice every month with a set of pre-designed initial basic questions, for their response. The pre-designed initial basic questions were drawn from the researcher’s personal experience at STC’s loyalty group and through consultations with top-level managers working at the Loyalty group of STC. In real life, the subscriber’s decisions are independent of each other, so the researcher figured it was appropriate to conduct individual interviews with the members. During interviews, a pre-

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designed set of initial questions (Appendix A) were asked, members’ feedback was noted to improve the questions and the possible answers, notes were taken to act as supporting information for interpretation. The next method employed in undertaking this research involved two whole day group meetings at the end of the interviews for sharing the thoughts and inputs by the members. A list of key issues related to churn in the telecoms industry, inspired by the Document 2 literature review, were discussed at a meeting with colleagues in STC. The meeting arrived at a series of nine attributes that related churn, the telecoms industry, and STC in a meaningful way. From the meeting, for each attribute, a list of potential questions - involving different service/operational activities specific to STC – was developed (See Appendix A). For each attribute, approximately a week was spent in interviewing the members and obtaining their views on the relevance and usefulness of the questions. This translated into ninety interview meetings, each lasting between 60 to 90 minutes. Summary notes of interview overview and main issues raised during the interview are outlined in Appendix B, Participating Mobile Customers – Interviews. Participants were briefed about the area of interest and its questions before each interview session. At the end of each interview, participants were also briefed about the topic and questions for the next meeting to avoid surprise and for them to be prepared for the questions.

The initial set of questions were enhanced and updated from interviews based on members’ input, discussions and the researcher’s interpretations. After nine such meetings with each member, two group meetings, each of approximately 120 minutes duration, were conducted to share members’ views and common understandings. While individual interviews were about garnering personal insights concerning customer churn and issues around subscriber commitment from a personal level, the group interviews were discussions meant to harmonise the perspectives and reasons of customer defection. During the interviews, in addition to obtaining members’ views on our projected questionnaire content, their views on the issues being addressed were also sourced. At the end of all the interviews, the set of questions were compiled into questionnaire (Appendix C) for future use to collect data for the next phase of the research study.

The final questionnaire comprised 13 sections. The first section contained information about the study and the researcher as well as prompts to source for consumer contact details. The second section had screening questions that were meant to determine the suitability of the potential respondent to participate in the study. For example, no respondents that had participated in a research survey regarding telecommunication over the past six months were

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allowed to participate in the study pursuant to prompt S2. This was a measure to avert respondent bias. Section A, which was the third section of the questionnaire overall, prompted respondents for general information about their subscription, the services they were aware of and the reasons that would motivate them the most to subscribe to new services with their respective service providers. The fourth section of the questionnaire, titled Section B in the questionnaire, contained 14 Image reflective indicators related to the three key Image attributes. It was retrospectively considered that the fourteen questions formulated in the end were a comprehensive reflection of these three Image attributes.

The fifth questionnaire section, entitled Section C in the questionnaire, had five ‘Commitment’ items, three relating to the notions of Affective Commitment, Normative Commitment and continuance commitment, and two relative to preference regarding competitor Services. In Section D, which was the sixth section essentially, contained prompts related to major Service areas about quality of call and network coverage. Similarly, the seventh section of the questionnaire, Section E, contained service awareness prompts such as rating of value added services. Questionnaire Section F (section eight) related to handling of complaints, which also related to quality of service. One pricing scale was developed based on the questionnaire prompts at section nine of the questionnaire, which was titled section G. Section H (section ten), Section I (Section eleven), and Section J (section twelve) covered the areas of sales offices, customer care, and website respectively. Finally, section 13 sourced for background information of the respondents such as their nationality and work status. It is noteworthy that each of the questions from sections D through J, which were covering the six Service areas and Price, had one top-level or headline question seeking the respondents’ overall rating of the Service area. Additionally, these sections of the questionnaire comprised a number of detailed prompts designed to provide more finely grained insights.

The results of the focus group interviews were analysed in order to develop the questionnaire based on the views of former STC customers. The interviewees involved in the focus groups largely indicated dissatisfaction with STC in relation to service quality, service features, Price, complaint resolution, fault resolution, and after-sales customer service. Document 3 showed that all interviewees expected high levels of service from STC although STC was not meeting their expectations. Low commitment levels towards STC were detected with similar dissatisfaction levels being observed in the service awareness, quality of call, visiting sales offices, calling customer call centres and browsing STC website attributes. Responses were also used as an input into the refinement and development of the

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questionnaire. During the interviews, in addition to obtaining members’ views on our projected questionnaire content, their views on the issues being addressed were also sourced. However, there were controversies in interviewees’ perspectives concerning complaint handling and network coverage. In the end, Document 3 could not report on conclusive measuring of the impact that such aspects of customer commitment and satisfaction have on commitment. In addition, the scope of Document 3 did not require specific information such as demographics and this was necessary in developing conclusive research in the end.