Abstract:
Customer retention has been a preferred strategic choice among marketers owing to the higher cost
of customer acquisition. As a consequence, marketers have widely deployed Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) tools to operationalize their intent and the subject has drawn significant
academic attention. A dominant paradigm in academics prescribed customer satisfaction as a primary
precursor to customer loyalty. But changes in business regulations across the globe and rapid
technological advancement have lowered the switching barriers and thus fueling propensity to switch
despite being satisfied with an existing service provider. Recent researches empirically confirm the
changing reality of markets by empirically highlighting the inability of customer satisfaction as a
construct to fully explain consumer switching behavior, particularly in the context of E-services
wherein switching barriers are perceived to be even lower. The lack of any comprehensive study to
explain the consumer switching intention in the context of E-services has been the primary
motivation behind this study. The main aim of this study is to examine the role of consumer
switching barrier in consumer switching behavior. This is an exploratory study and we have
performed an extensive literature review followed by in-depth interviews among consumers to
develop a conceptual framework. Our exploratory research indicates that besides satisfaction from
core service offering, organizational antecedents such as service bundling, subscriber lock-in, asset
specificity, and network value can lead to consumer switching barriers that in turn reduce switching
intention. The study has important implications for theory and practice.
