High-Educated Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality: An Assessment of the SSTQUAL Scale in the Romanian Banking Industry

Abstract

Service quality has gained researchers’ attention all over the world. Despite the great contribution that has been made to the literature in this field so far, researchers and practitioners still need to make an attempt to better understand consumers’ perceptions of service quality in the present technological environment. In the banking context, technology enabled services such as ATMs, Internet Banking and Mobile Banking have been gradually adopted by the Romanian banks at the expense of territorial units. Therefore, banks’ management attention should be directed towards identifying consumers’ perceptions of electronic banking service quality. The aim of this paper is to evaluate consumers’ perceptions of technology enabled services within the banking industry. For this purpose, a large sample of high-educated young consumers was surveyed using the SSTQUAL dimensions. Results indicate that the SSTQUAL scale needs to be refined in order to better fit the Romanian banking context. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first which tests the SSTQUAL scale in a developing country. Therefore, the findings highlighted in this paper are of great importance both from a theoretical and a practical perspective.