Customer retention and loyalty are concepts gaining more and more attention in today’s business when loyal customers are considered as essential components to organizational survival and success. Therefore, organizations strive to identify and apply effective methods to retain their customers. Based on the relevant bibliography and practitioners’ perception, customer loyalty is the main driver of company’s retention rate improvement, resulting in profitability and market share improvements, since in nowadays the cost to acquire new customers is bigger than the cost to retain at least the most valuable customers.
This study attempts to consider the relationship between customers’ perception on product and service quality provided by mobile telecommunication operators and customer perception of service value and customer satisfaction and further explain customer behavioral intentions, identified as conative loyalty, based on the above mentioned constructs plus two additional constructs representing main customers ’ switching barriers. Partial least square was used to examine the pattern of inter-correlations among the seven proposed constructs and to test related propositions empirically. The research subjects were customers of the three Greek mobile telecommunication services providers. The survey was conducted to a random sample of985 post-paid and pre-paid residential mobile telecommunication services users, who were asked to respond to an appropriately prepared questionnaire. The results showed that both product and service quality level of service providers affect service’s perceived value but only product quality affects customer satisfaction formation. Then product quality, service value perception, customer satisfaction, perceived switching cost and attraction of alternatives determines customers’ conative loyalty. Moreover, switching barriers constructs acts as mediators between customer satisfaction and service value perception and customers’ behavioral intention adjusting their conative loyalty. Finally, theoretical contributions and practical implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.