By Osakwe Onyebuchi Francis
The aim of this study is to investigate the Problems and Prospects of Marketing Telecommunication Service in Lagos Metropolis. The problem of the study can be traced to the poor marketing image of NITEL products nationwide. This poor marketing image has created great dissatisfaction for telecommunications consumers nationwide. This situation motivated an investigation into the problem and prospects of marketing NITEL services in Lagos metropolis. To investigate the problem, certain objectives were defined. These were: To find out the problems of marketing Nigerian Telecommunications services in Lagos; to investigate the prospects of marketing NITEL services in Lagos metropolis; to find out the seriousness of the problems; and finally to estimate the seriousness of the prospects. To achieve these objectives, both secondary and primary research method were used. Using a structured questionnaire, responses were collected from respondents. The responses were analyzed using percentage frequencies. The findings show that the main problem experienced by the customers are: poor quality of services by NITEL, acute shortage of resources on the part of NITEL management to maintain efficient and fault free services, shortage of qualified manpower and inability of NITEL to send service bills regularly to customers. Based on these findings, the following recommendations were made: NITEL management should ensure that maintenance and installation materials such as cables, exchange spares are procured and made available on regular basis. Service faults should be promptly attended to. NITEL management should be courteous about decision on retrenchment of her workforce. The management should introduce prepayment in most of the services to reduce disputed bill cases and inability on the part of customer to settle their bills. Finally, suggestions on further research were made.