Switching Costs between Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Empirical Evidence from Broadband Services in Mainland China

Switching cost is becoming a popular topic in the researches of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. There are already some deeply understandings of the relationship among switching cost, satisfaction and loyalty inside many marketing literatures. Even so, there are still two open questions have not been answered: firstly how the cost of switching service or product influences in customer loyalty when it is linked to customers´ satisfaction; secondly how the relationship of satisfaction and loyalty will be changed by different categories switching costs. This paper is based on the empirical investigation of broadband users´ satisfaction and loyalty to their service provider in Beijing market, and presents that the special and important effects that switching cost has on the customer satisfaction and loyalty link.