Service Quality, Perceived Value, Corporate Image, and Customer Loyalty in the Context of Varying Levels of Switching Costs

The current study moves beyond customer-perceived value and corporate image and demonstrates that switching costs are important factors in influencing a customer's decision to stay with a service provider. This work finds support for a contingency model involving customer-perceived value, corporate image, and switching costs. The results indicate that the impacts of customer-perceived value and corporate image on customer loyalty decrease under conditions of high switching costs. Implications of the results are discussed. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.