Customer Perception and Responsiveness Behavior Study on Bulk SMS Advertisements for Target Customer Identification: The case of Ethio Telecom

Bulk-messaging, one of the technologies carried by the telecom industry, is a process of sending a large number of messages to many people at once. It is likely a more economical and effective way of marketing media as compared to others. Therefore, many companies are using this service for advertisement. Since it is most likely flooding without customers' consent, it can be one of the services that affect customers' responsiveness behavior. Studying customers' preferences prior to sending a message will help to overcome resource dissipation due to messaging and reduces customers' offensiveness. The aim of this thesis is to identify factors that affect customers' responsiveness attitude and classify customers based on the level of responses, towards bulkmessaging advertisements in the case of Ethio Telecom customers. In this thesis, two different types of data were used i.e. data collected in-person via questionnaire and a Call Detail Records (CDR) data. Among 620 distributed questionnaires 528 were replied. Moreover, a CDR data of 29 ,506 messages got responses among 419 ,249 delivered messages. A statistical mean method and data mining techniques were used to classify a survey and CDR data respectively. As a finding, all scale factors do have a significant influence on the responsiveness behavior of customers towards bulk-messaging except informativeness and relevancy. Furthermore, customers were classified into three levels i.e. a high-level, medium level, and low-level responsive customers with percentage responses of 16 %, 44 %, and 40 % of the total respectively. Additionally, an entertaining type of advertisement has got more responses than others. The experiment result of both data set shows a good level of agreement. Finally, the thesis recommended that all senders should give attention to care for customers' preferences towards any promoting services.