An investigation on broadband Internet service and its bill payment sentiment

Abstract

The market of broadband Internet (BBI) service in Hong Kong has been saturated and fiercely competitive. Most of the service providers formulate their strategies to cope with this situation from the supply-side perspective. In order to address all the demand of consumers, however, the marketers of the service providers should learn more about their consumers (the demand-side) by considering the following questions. (1) What service aspects of BBI service do most consumers concern about? (2) Which service aspect in BBI service is the most influential one? As bill payment was one of the top issues among consumer complaints, marketers should address below questions as well. (3) Does bill payment have impact on consumer sentiment towards whether to stay or quit the current BBI service? (4) How do consumers evaluate BBI service bill payment? The aim of this dissertation is to address the questions listed above. To address these questions, frameworks of consumer feeling towards BBI service, consumer sentiment towards payment advice and the attributes of bill payment were developed in this research project. Based on the frameworks, questionnaires were designed. Next, surveys were employed to collect data from consumers. After data analysis, there were five major findings in response to the above questions. First, most consumers were concerned about four aspects of BBI service: bill payment, speed, promotional offer and technical support service. These four BBI aspects were inter-related and dictated by a model in terms of consumers' influential feelings. Second, bill payment was the most influential BBI service aspect as found in the study. Third, a measure for assessing consumer sentiment towards payment advice was established. With this measure, payment advice of BBI service was found to have a significant impact on consumer sentiment as to whether to stay with current service or not. Fourth, a set of evaluation criteria of bill payment was established based on the consumer's preferred attributes of bill payment. Fifth, it was found in illustration of evaluation criteria that the good features of the payment advice (e.g. payment history shown) would have impacts on consumer's positive sentiment and that the flaws of the payment advice (e.g. no service charge breakdown shown) would increase consumer's negative sentiment or dissatisfaction.

Date of Award	15 Feb 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Kin Lim John HO (Supervisor)