Committed or trapped? Exploring the link between customer satisfaction and retention in financial services

Customer retention is a critical issue for managers and several studies have been done to find the factors influencing customer retention. In addition, marketing scholars have long been interested in the link between customer satisfaction and customer retention. However, empirically the link between satisfaction and retention has often been less strong than we have wanted to believe. In many cases, customer satisfaction is not enough to explain customer retention because customers still defect when satisfaction is high and stay with the firm when satisfaction is low (Hennig‐Thurau and Klee, 1997). With the purpose to shed some light in the explanation of customer retention issue, the current research uses the well-known motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) framework developed by MacInnis and Jaworski (1989) to examine customer retention in financial services. Besides, the study also explores the causality among variables of MOA in customer retention.