Mapping Customers’ Perception and Loyalty Towards JIO SIM in the Context of Withdrawal of Free Service Offers

Imagining a world devoid of telecommunication technology today would undoubtedly look insipid and dreary. Telecommunication has become an integral part of societal infrastructure. As the penetration and usage of internet access to people across the globe is increasing from 400 million (in the year 2000) to 3.2 billion (in the year 2015), telecom service providers are vying with each other to acquire a larger subscription base for their mobile data subscription. India occupies second largest position in the world by number of telephone users (both fixed and mobile phone) with 1.053 billion subscribers as on 31 August 2016. India offers one of the lowest call tariffs in the world enabled by mega telecom operators and hyper-competition among them. It has the world's second-largest Internet user-base. As on 31st March 2016, there were 342.65 million internet subscribers in the country. Some of the major telecommunication service providers in India are - Reliance Jio, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. In this research paper, an effort is made to examine the effectiveness of customer acquisition strategies used by RIL (Reliance Industries Ltd) in securing and retaining customer loyalty even in the context of withdrawal of free service offers. An attempt is also made to map the perception of consumers on account of free offer withdrawal. Descriptive research design was adopted for the study. Primary data was collected through e-survey technique from around a hundred JIO SIM users spread across 2 metropolitan cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad in South India. Secondary data was collected from multiple sources including journals, websites, newspapers, e-data base repositories and others