Service Quality Dimensions in the Banking Industry and It's Effect on Customer Satisfaction (Case Study)

Abstract

In the competitive world, it is a key factor to meet customer satisfaction which is followed by organizations. Customer satisfaction is one of fundamental principles of quality management. Loyal and satisfied customers bring about stable income for organizations. Thus organizations pay special attention to factors such as customer knowledge, customer relationships, and determination of methods for meeting customer satisfaction and for providing suitable goods and services to meet customer needs because Customer is the most important asset of organization. Peter Drucker claims that customer satisfaction is the goal and aim of all activities. “Increased competition, meeting customer satisfactions ...are new concepts that have strongly affected current world in a way that one cannot compete or even survive according old ideas in new world.” There is no doubt that development of technology has increased customers ‘expectations to receive quality and on time services. Customers will no longer accept any quality of services. Service quality is increasingly becoming a major strategic variable (Robledo, 2001; Terziovski and Dean, 1998). And This construct has received increased scrutiny during the last few decades (Svensson, 2004). In the 1980, large organizations became more interested in the development of service quality measures (Dedeke, 2003). Much of the research has focused on measuring service quality using the SERVQUAL instrument (Kang, 2006; Ladhair, 2008). While, the SERVQUAL technique has attracted a lot of attention for its conceptualization of quality measurement issues, it has also attracted criticism (O’Neill et al., 1998). One criticism of SERVQUAL has been the point that the instrument mainly focuses on the service delivery process. That is, while the contemporary studies on service quality seemingly focused on the process of service delivery, additional aspects to be considered have already been suggested, especially by European scholars (Kang and James, 2004). For example, Gronroos noted that the quality of a service as perceived by customers has three dimensions: functional (or process) dimension, technical (or outcome) dimension and image (Kang and James, 2004). Thus, the European perspective versus