A Model of Customer Switching Barriers for Increasing its Loyalty

As the competitive environment becomes more complex and turbulent, the most important issue of organizations encountered with is not only providing the high quality products and services with affordable price, but also maintaining the customers who will contribute to the long-term benefit. In this regard, an important element in achieving competitive advantage is concerning to customer switching barriers. This study initially recognizes and evaluates the factors inhibiting the customer switching and then it will be investigated to find whether such barrier factors may increase the customers’ loyalty. Accordingly, in the previous research in this area has been studied and some variables were identified. Then, an interview done with 15 people, the LG and Goldiran companies’ senior managers to evaluate and adjust these variables. In this regard, the research hypotheses were developed for the model that includes six hypotheses. Therefore, there were distributed 334 questionnaires between customers of LG and Goldiran and hypotheses were analyzed by path analysis. According to the results of this survey, customer switching barriers lead to increasing loyalty and these barriers also effect on customer satisfaction and value. Finally, it becomes clear that customer value will not necessarily lead to satisfaction.