A Study On User's Switching Behavior On Coloring Ring Back Tone Usage

With the development of telecom markets, many value-added services are gradually accepted by consumers. Every year more and more users are involved in these services. At the same time, there appears 'high-in high-out'phenomenon among the consumers, which would influence the operators'market share and profits. A lot of researches about telecom consumers'switching behavior focus on describing the switching users'characters and forecasting the switching probability by applying some data mining methods, lacking the exploration of reasons why these users churn. This paper attempts to analyze the factors that may cause the telecom users to churn from these valued-added services. By investigating the popular valued-added service CRBT (Coloring Ring Back Tone), we establish a model to test the possible factors influencing users'switching behavior and make some suggestions about customer retention.By referring to a lot of literatures and analyzing some cases, this paper identifies some possible factors influencing the CRBT users' switching intention and behavior, including perceived uselessness, playfulness fading, perceived price level, expectation disconfirmation and so on. As applying the theory of planned behavior and expectation disconfirmation theory, we establish a model to test the hypothesis and make some conclusions. The main tasks and findings of this paper are listed below: (1) Summarizing the authority theoretic and literature in the fields of customer churn, theory of planned behavior, expectation disconfirmation theory and many other aspects related to the study.(2) Providing some new conceptions, like perceived uselessness and playfulness fading and forming the special CRBT users'switching model based on the theory of planned behavior and expectation disconfirmation theory.(3) By the means of survey based on questionnaire and data analyzing, this paper has tested that many factors may influence the usage of CRBT, including perceived uselessness, playfulness fading, perceived price level, disconfirmation, perceived behavior control, attitude, subject norm and dissatisfaction.(4) This study finds that except subject norm, all other factors listed above could directly and indirectly influence the CRBT users'switching behavior. And the results are further discussed for future study.