Internet Service Providers and their Customer Switching
             The rapid growth in New Zealand Internet use, combined with relatively easy market entry by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) has resulted in the competitive supply of Internet services.
             2001 Census Snapshot1 (Who has access to the internet?) from Statistics New Zealand indicates almost 4 in 10 households have access to the internet in New Zealand, especially with households in the Auckland and Wellington regions, they have the highest rates of internet access at nearly 9 in 20.
             On the other hand, empirical evidence collected points out the seriousness of the competitive threat ISPs have to face while they capitalize on the large population of Internet users. The research conducted by Nielsen/Net Ratings2 (19/11/2001) shown on the number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) within each country in comparison to the country's population presents New Zealand has ranked 7th place globally, having 36 ISPs within a relatively small population of 3.8 million. That means slightly over 100,000 head counts per ISP in New Zealand.
             From the marketer's perspective today, challenges and opportunities coexist in the broad marketplace; undoubtedly any ISP without exception needs to exert all the marketing efforts to retain current customers and attract new customers as well while the pressure to make money has increased substantially as income from Web advertisements has dropped in recent years.
             Analysis of customer retention and its impact has received recent attention in much research (e.g. Keaveney 1995;Reichheld and Sasser 1990). This paper focuses on specific industry---Internet service providers and is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses how important switching and switching barriers are in Internet service provider's sector, whilst the reasons why customers/businesses stay with one ISP even though they may have seriously considered alternatives will be examined ...