Abstract
Retaining customers is increasingly being recognized by businesses as a path to long-term business profitability. Although there has been a great deal of work on customer customers’ switching behaviors recently, however, relatively few studies have provided a discussion of customers’ switching behaviors ranging from the “switched-from” firm to the “switched-to” firm in the meantime. Thus, our study attempts to explore the push factors that motivate people to leave an origin, the pull factors that positively draw prospective migrants to a destination, and mooring (which consists of the obstacles that prevent migration from occurring) effects on customers’ switching intentions and to examine the different outcomes between switchers (customers who have switched to other companies before) and stayers (customers who have never switched from other companies). The main contribution of the paper is to consider different kinds of customers in the analysis of customer switching behavior. This study may lead to a better understanding of customer-firm relationships for businesses to make a better strategy of customer retention.