Product quality vs service quality in the mobile industry: Is there a dominant driver of customer intention to switch providers?

As service-dominant logic is being proposed and tested in several industries, this study extends the investigation of this theory and provides insights for both researchers and practitioners under the context of the mobile industry. This study advances the understanding of customer switching intention by assessing the relative strength of product quality and service quality in terms of mobile provider switching behavior. This study develops the proposed research model that integrates previous validated constructs contextualized to the mobile industry and employs partial least square – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the corresponding survey data and test the model fit. The results strongly support the hypotheses related to quality and its antecedents. The analysis results also suggest that overall mobile provider service quality and customer intention to switch mobile products significantly influence customer intention to switch providers. However, the overall product quality does not significantly influence customer intention to switch mobile products. This research contributes to the debate of goods-dominant and service-dominant logic by empirically supporting the dominance of service quality within the context of one industry, the mobile industry. In addition, this paper discusses the implications of the findings and presents future research directions.