The comparison of the service quality of the existing GSM operators in Turkey and competition strategies

Although the GSM services do not have a long history in Turkey, they have found a rapidly increasing demand environment and have become a substantial market very soon. In Turkey, there are currently three GSM operators (companies) that show activity in the communication sector, namely, Avea, Turkcell and Voda- fone. A strong competition between them is now inevitable arising both from market structure, excessive requirements and strategies applied by these ope- rators. In this harsh competition area, it was observed that the "Service Qua- lity" concept significantly increased in importance. The main purposes of this study are the comparison of the service qu- alities of the existing GSM operators in Turkey and the examination of their competition strategy applications.In accordance with these purposes, the SERVQUAL Model was adap- ted for this sector to measure the service qualities of the existing GSM ope- rators, to determine the differences between the expected and the perceived service qualities by the customers from the companies, to define the effects of the demographic characteristics of the customers on their expectations and perceptions, to identify the level of significance of the dimensions of the servi- ce quality and to analyse the service quality of each dimension comparatively. In this analysis, the results of a self-completion questionnaire which was distributed to the randomly selected 427 people who live in Yenimahalle and Çankaya districts in Ankara, were evaluated. The statistical datas of the examination were analysed with a 95% level of significance. Firstly, the reliability analysis of the questionnaire was execu- ted and then the datas were put upon a frequency distribution, a hypothesis test and an anova analysis. The achieved results were evaluated in SPSS 17,0 (Statistical Package for Socandial Sciences) and in Microsoft Office Excel 2007. Besides, in the study, the competition strategies of the GSM operators in Turkey were considered and the reflection of these strategies on the custo- mers was discussed. Key words; 1) Service Quality 2) SERVQUAL Method 3) Competition Strategies 4) GSM Operators