Research of factors influencing loyal customer switching behaviour

Modern competitive business environment makes gaining and retaining competitive advantage more and more difficult. Building relationships with customers often becomes the activity that further guarantees successful competition for the organization in everchanging business world. Different scientists (Reichheld, Sasser, 1990; Grönroos, 1994; Rust, Oliver, 1994; Anderson et al., 1994; Berry, 1995; Reinartz, Kumar, 2000) acknowledge customer relationship to be of benefit for organizations on a long-term basis by emphasizing economic and non-economic benefits resultant from customer loyalty. However, according to I. Roos (1999) the activity of building customer loyalty becomes problematic due to increasing loyalty costs, while empirical research reveals that customer satisfaction as such does not guarantee that customers satisfied with the product or service will resist from switching to the alternative one (Ganesh et al., 2000). This situation puts the very relationship marketing in trouble: up-to-date research reveals that modern customers are simply not willing to be committed to single brand or single company representing that brand (Liu, 2007). However, the importance of customer loyalty for business organizations induces further scientific discussion regarding the topic of customer retention: scientists are constantly searching for new ways enabling companies to control customer switching behaviour. It is no coincidence that customer loyalty studies presented in scientific literature recently started focusing on the process of ending relationship between customer and companies with the aim to reveal reasons behind the customer decision to end his/her relationship with the company. The analysis of relationship ending as of the outcome of behavioural disloyalty is assumed to lead to significant insight regarding issues of customer loyalty management and help avoid potential loss of customers. [...]Marketingo katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta