Abstract
For Taiwan high-tech industries’ move from manufacture to service, the customer relationship and loyalty management become one of the most important issues. In order to maintain customer’s loyalty, the firms would find that there are two key dimensions considered in the literature: the customer satisfaction and switching barrier. It is however not clear if and how the two dimensions affect the customer loyalty in Taiwan industries’ knowledge-intensive service operations.This research has therefore focused on how customer satisfaction and switching barrier affect customer’s loyalty by adopting qualitative research methodology through interviewing firms in knowledge-intensive service operations. By observing the lock-in effect induced in the processes of customer satisfaction and switching barrier, this research is aim to find out how the case firms use the processes to affect the customer loyalty and achieve these firms’ business and marketing goals.One of the main findings of this research is that the key aspects that the affect the use of lock in effects are the competitive position and monopoly power of the firms, when they may consider taking switching barrier as the main avenue to enhance the customer loyalty. Conversely, those firms with less of the competitive posture and in mature market would emphasize more on the process of customer satisfaction and its influence on the customer loyalty.