Service Quality in Banking with Special Reference to ICICI Bank Ltd., Tiruchirappalli District

Abstract

As per the Economic association of Indonesia and India, India has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world since the early 90s and India is fourth largest economy of the world after US in terms of purchasing power parity. This is because of the important role played by the financial sector comprising a large number of well managed banking services both in public and private sectors. India's second largest bank is the ICICI Bank offering a wide range of financial services to its customers through its delivery channels. To attain this sustainable competitive advantage, service industries face a unique challenge of meeting the needs of the customers regularly and continuously. Though mechanized form of activity has its own impact on service delivery performance, many service industries still remain to be manual because there exits no equivalent substitute for personal interaction between the employees of service industry and customers. The optimum mix of technology and people in the service delivery process decides the competitive advantage of an organization. Customer satisfaction is taken as a yardstick for measuring the quality of service and providing excellent customer service decides the effectiveness of service delivery process. Only through excellent customer service, an organization can consistently exceed customer expectations. In order to achieve customer satisfaction, every service organization must understand and improve service delivery process and implement valid and reliable service performance measures to measure the same. To assess the degree of customer satisfaction, a SERVQUAL instrument is administered to study the quality of service and the gaps were identified in the services offered by ICICI Bank, Tiruchirapalli District in all five dimensions of service quality, the overall weighted SERVQUAL score being −1.92. The ICICI Bank Ltd. has to take steps to close the gaps by establishing a service quality information system.