On the relationship between perceived service quality, service loyalty and switching costs

Introduction In the literature on services marketing relatively little attention has been paid to the concept of service loyalty. A limited number of attempts have been made to conceptualise service loyalty and to investigate its antecedents (Gremler and Brown, 1996). However, despite these attempts and despite its perceived importance in marketing theory and practice (Jones and Sasser, 1995; Reichfeld and Sasser, 1990), customer loyalty still “presents an enigma to researchers” (Oliver, 1996, p. 389). Implicitly, service loyalty is often incorporated as an ultimate dependent variable in service quality models (Fornell et al., 1996), yet the precise nature of the service quality-service loyalty connection has remained fuzzy as the result of limited conceptualisations and contradictory empirical results (Boulding et al., 1993; Cronin and Taylor, 1992). Most studies that have examined the service quality-service loyalty relationship focused on one specific industry only, limiting the generalisability of results (e.g. Crosby and Stephens, 1987; Kelley et al., 1993; Rust and Zahorik, 1993). Furthermore, Cronin and Taylor (1992) and Zeithaml et al. (1996) report differences between various service providers, but they both do not specifically address explanations for these differences. Dick and Basu (1994) suggest that the level of switching costs in a given industry might very well influence customers’ disposition towards different services. In this article we examine the relationship between service quality, service loyalty and switching costs across five different service industries. It is structured as follows. First, we will offer a brief synthesis of the extant literature on key conceptual issues. We subsequently discuss the results of a study designed to provide a multi-sector insight on the relationship between service quality, service loyalty and switching costs. We conclude with a discussion of a number of theoretical and managerial implications of our results. Received February 1997 Accepted November 1997