Customer switching behavior in service industries: an exploratory study
Keaveney reports an exploratory critical incident study of customer switching in service industries. She opens from the observation that switching harms the market share and profitability of service firms and had received little attention in marketing research. More than 500 service customers described incidents behind a change of provider, and from those accounts she identified more than 800 service firm behaviours that led customers to switch, sorted into eight general categories. The paper discusses implications for later model development and gives recommendations to service managers. A published review of lost-customer research lists the categories as core service failures, dissatisfactory service encounters, price, inconvenience, a poor response to a service failure, competition, ethical problems and involuntary switching, places the first two at the head, and notes that many customers described switching as the result of linked incidents. Reading depth: abstract; the figures used are more than 500 customers, more than 800 behaviours and eight categories.
Keaveney reports an exploratory critical incident study of customer switching in service industries. She opens from the observation that switching harms the market share and profitability of service firms and had received little attention in marketing research. More than 500 service customers described incidents behind a change of provider, and from those accounts she identified more than 800 service firm behaviours that led customers to switch, sorted into eight general categories. The paper discusses implications for later model development and gives recommendations to service managers. A published review of lost-customer research lists the categories as core service failures, dissatisfactory service encounters, price, inconvenience, a poor response to a service failure, competition, ethical problems and involuntary switching, places the first two at the head, and notes that many customers described switching as the result of linked incidents. Reading depth: abstract; the figures used are more than 500 customers, more than 800 behaviours and eight categories.
Written from the abstract, Crossref record of the journal article, 2026-11-02; category list and ordering from a published review of lost-customer research.
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Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Keaveney, S. M. (1995). Customer switching behavior in service industries: an exploratory study. Journal of Marketing, 59(2), 71-82. doi:10.2307/1252074 https://doi.org/10.2307/1252074