Factors Affecting Customer Switching Behavior in the Mobile Phone Market: The Case of Egypt

Mobile phone markets are one of the most turbulent market environments today due to increased competition and change. Thus, it is of growing concern to look at consumer switching decision process and shed light on factors that finally determine consumer choices of moving between different mobile service providers. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between service related attributes, non-service related attributes and customer switching behaviour (CSB) to develop and test a conceptual model of the antecedents of CSB in the Egyptian mobile phone market. Moreover, eight hypotheses were developed and tested using a sample of 245 Egyptian mobile users. The strength of the relationship between the constructs indicates that most features of the suggested CSB model including service quality, value added services, network coverage, promotions, reputation and convenience are crucial to understand CSB in the Egyptian mobile market. However, switching cost and technology level were found to have no significant impact on CSB.