The Impact of Service Characteristics on the Switching Costs–Customer Loyalty Link

By Markus Blut, S. Beatty, Heiner Evanschitzky, Christian Brock. 2014

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This research investigates the interrelationship between service characteristics and switching costs and makes two contributions to the service retailing literature: (1) As a means of better understanding the effectiveness of switching costs, the study suggests a two-dimensional typology of switching costs, including internal and external switching costs and (2) it reveals that the effect of these switching costs on customer loyalty is contingent upon four service characteristics (the IHIP characteristics of service). We carried out a meta-analytic review of the literature on the switching costs-customer loyalty link and created a hierarchical linear model using a sample of 1,694 customers from 51 service industries. Results reveal that external switching costs have a stronger average effect on customer loyalty than do internal switching costs. Moreover, we find that IHIP characteristics moderate the links between switching costs and customer loyalty. Thus, the link between external switching costs and customer loyalty is weaker in industries higher in the four service characteristics (as compared to industries lower in these characteristics), while the opposite moderating effect of service characteristics for the internal switching costs-loyalty link is noted.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d51ebdebc139be55de013dd65ad494a2bb48e13

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Markus Blut
2. Thomas Rudolph
3. Liane Nagengast
4. Heiner Evanschitzky
5. Heesup Han

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Markus Blut
2. Thomas Rudolph
3. Liane Nagengast
4. Heiner Evanschitzky
5. Heesup Han

Citations in the corpus

• New insights in the moderating effect of switching costs on the satisfaction-repurchase behavior link (2014, methodology): “In addition to this definition, research has also classified SC into different types (e.g., Blut et al., 2014, Burnham et al., 2003, Jones et al., 2002 and Patterson and Smith, 2003).”