AN ANALYSIS OF FACTORS AFFECTING SWITCHING BEHAVIOR OF CUSTOMER IN GENRAL INSURANCE INDUSTRY IN BADULLA DISTRICT

Abstract

The study investigates the customer satisfaction, switching costs, service quality and customer loyalty on customer switching behavior in general insurance industry. There is so far lack of research has been conducted concerning the customer satisfaction, switching costs, service quality and customer loyalty on customer switching behavior in general insurance industry. This research study plan to examine that problem and fulfill the empirical gap in insurance policy holders in general insurance industry' Insurance sector in Sri Lanka is growing very fast. Today, more and more private section insurance companies entering to the market, and it cause to strong the competition in the country among the insurance companies. So, retain the existing customers by satisffing them and attract potential customers is a crucial issue for the insurance companies. As there are 27 insurance companies operate in Sri Lanka insurance industry offering various kind of insurance products, customers have vast range of choices and they have become more powerful decision maker in the market. Customers are able to quickly switch to another service provider, when they dissatisfied with the curreirt service provider. So that it is more important to identiff what are the key factors affect to customer switch from the current service provider. So, giving more attention to the customers and providing customer's need can prevent from customer switching in general insurance industry. The purpose of this study is to identifu the factors affect for customer switching in general insurance industry. Tq achieve this goal 213 questionnaires were distributed among customers who are the general insurance policy holders in selected four insurance companies in Badulla district. This study is based on four factors that affect to customer switching behavior and these factors were extracted from the literature. The findings of this study disclosed that most important factors that are affect to the customer switching are customer satisfaction, service quality and customer loyalfy and the least important factor is customer switching costs.