The Impact of Switching Costs on the Customer Satisfaction-Loyalty Link: Mobile Phone Service in the Czech Republic

This thesis seeks to explain the dynamics influencing customer loyalty in the Czech market for mobile phone services. Customer loyalty is an important concept in such a saturated market where acquisition of new customers nearly always merits convincing them to leave their current provider, so customer retention is a more adequate strategy to ensure business prosperity. Structural equation modeling is employed in order to build a reliable model which would explain the relationships among the concepts of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, service quality, and the role of switching costs. The results yield supporting evidence for the positive relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction, as well as the positive relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. There is no conclusive evidence for the impact of switching costs on the satisfaction-loyalty link