Research On Influencing Factors Of Chinese Mobile Communication Customers’ Switching Intention By Mobile Number Portability

As one of supporting measures of telecommunications reform, Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has been implemented in about seventy countries or regions all over the world. The implementation of MNP can increase user’s liquidity, reduce customer’s cost of service provider switching, promote competition among mobile operators, and optimize the structure of telecommunication market. In China, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom are the three only mobile operators, of which China Mobile dominates the market. In order to form a relative balance of the telecom market competition, China Telecom has conducted experimental implement of MNP in Tianjin and Hainan provinces, however the result has been far away from the exceptions. It fails to promote the full implementation of MNP policy in China. According to the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior, behavior intention will directly affect the occurrence of behavior, therefore the switching intention will cause the same effect on switching behavior during the implementation of the MNP policy.Since MNP policy in China failed to achieve the expected effect, it is necessary to do a empirical study on the influence factors of switching intention and the route by which the factors affect each other.By investigating domestic research of MNP policy, we find that previous studies focus on market competition, conversion cost, unknowing consumers and switching intention, but there are few studies regareding to the switching intention. Derived from studies of MNP intention in different national mobile communications markets and the influence factors of MNP intention, considerting the real situation of telecom market in China, this thesis describes research hypotheses and sets up research model for Chinese mobile customers’ influence factors on MNP intention. This thesis also refers to the mature scale of correlated variables from both domestic and abroad studies, and then designes its questionnaire. The analysis of the data proves that the results of the scale have a good identification, reliability and validity. By building structural equation model, we find that the main influencing factors of switching intention are customer satisfaction, competitive attraction, subjective norm, switching barriers and policy perception of MNP. The main influencing factors of customer satisfaction are network quality, awareness rates and perceived service quality. The main influencing factors of switching barriers are subjective norm,usage habits and switching cost, besides,customer satisfaction also affects competitive attraction. Meanwhile, the test result shows that customers with difference in education background, age, gender, operator, monthly phone bills and awareness do not show significant differences in switching intention. However, customers with different perceive levels in MNP polices have significant differences in switching intention. And through the analysis and comparison, we find that the influence factors and the path coefficients of the customers’ switching intention are also different when they have different perceive levels in MNP policy.