Determinants of Customers` Churn Decision in the Nigeria Telecommunication Industry: An Analytic Hierarchy Process Approach

Abstract

This paper describes the application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for unraveling customers’ motivation for churn of telecommunication network in Nigeria. By identifying, modeling and measuring of customers` churn motivations across four mobile telecommunication service providers in Nigeria. AHP was used to design a hierarchical model of seven criteria for customers` churning of network and investigates the relative priorities of the criteria through a pairwise comparison. The questionnaire were administered through convenient sampling to 480 mobile telecommunication customers and was completed and returned by 438 mobile phone subscribers in Lagos state, Nigeria, but only 408 copies were useful for the analysis of this study. The result shows that six out of the seven criteria have weight above 10% in their individual contribution to motivating customer churn behavior in the Nigeria telecommunication industry. The inefficient data/ internet plan criterion has the highest weight of 18.81% relative to the churn decision. Thus, AHP effectively supported modeling and analyzing subscribers` motivation toward good marketing decision for both the individual and the organization. It helps in developing an analytic and intelligible framework of decision-making on complex problem of customer churn in an emerging market like Nigeria.
Classification-JEL: M3
Keywords: Inequality and growth; learning by consuming; wealth and income distribution; heterogeneous households