A phenomenological study of how mobile phone users in India cope with 'call drops'

Quality of mobile services is a major concern among various stakeholders, including customers and service providers. The customers who have had a poor quality of service often feel helpless, frustrated, angry, and react in ways detrimental to the business. The service providers fail to capture the insights of customers' coping mechanisms by using technological techniques. In this study, we used the phenomenological approach to grasp the very nature of the experiential phenomenon 'how mobile services customers cope with poor service quality and specifically call drops'. Mobile phone users in India are found to opt one of four coping mechanisms namely: cognitive coping, behavioural coping, seeking institutional support and seeking/migrating to alternative platforms. The factors that are found to be contributing the choice include economic concerns, recurrence of problem, intensity of underlying emotion, ability to regulate emotions (impulsive tendencies), and perceived urgency ascribed to the 'need to communicate'.