이동통신 서비스 지속사용 결정요인에 관한 연구: 자의 기반 메커니즘과 구속 기반 메커니즘의 이원적 모형 기반으로

Customer retention is one of the most critical issues for subscription-based businesses. A small decrease in churn not only cause a huge impact on enterprise value, but also increase customer bases of competitors. For those reasons, it is important for a company to prevent customers from switching away from their products or services. Studying customers’ continuous intention to use particular product or service, therefore, has received great attention and antecedents of customers’ continuous intention to use have focused two crucial factors: satisfaction and switching cost. Although both satisfaction and switching cost induce continuous intention to use particular product or service, the mechanism of these two factors are severely different. Satisfaction represents that customers are pleased with their consumption related fulfillment and therefore willing to use product or service continuously, while high switching cost makes customers to use product or service continuously even though they do not want to use it. In other words, satisfaction represents dedication-based mechanism, while switching cost represents constraint-based mechanism. Satisfaction and switching cost have been identified in the mobile telecommunications marketplace. However, there has not been an integrated framework to explain these two different mechanisms in the mobile telecommunications marketplace. In addition, it is not enough to simply explain customers’ continuous intention to use with satisfaction and switching costs. Under the subscription-based businesses, which unsatisfied customer becomes competitor’s customer, alternative attractiveness has to be considered together in the framework. Therefore, this study integrates the links between expectation-confirmation, satisfaction, switching costs, alternative attractiveness, and continuous intention in a single model. This integration extends past customer retention analysis in the mobile telecommunications marketplace with a dual model of dedication and constraint-based mechanisms. The model is tested by survey data from a sample of 208 young adults who have used mobile telecommunications services. The result shows that expectation-confirmation affects satisfaction and satisfaction leads to continuous intention to use a current mobile service provider under the dedicationbased mechanism. Under the constraint-based mechanism, high perceived switching cost makes customers stay in the relationship with the current mobile service provider as expected. However,alternative attractiveness, specifically perceived price attractiveness and handset quality attractiveness, is revealed to weaken this relationship. This paper can help managers of mobile telecommunications service develop strategies to successfully retain their own customers under the threat that competitors impose.