A Measurement of Customer Service Quality of Banks in Dhaka City of Bangladesh

Summary

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This study attempts to identify the factors related to service quality of the banks in Dhaka City of Bangladesh. It identifies the relationship between age, educational background, profession, and length of involvement, types of services obtained by the clients and the service quality factors. An extensive survey of bank clients has been performed with a structured questionnaire to identify the factors. A segmentation of the respondents was made based on the nature of services provided by the banks such as, deposit, lending and other financial services. The sample clients were selected randomly at the banks while interviewing. Factor analysis was done to identify the service quality factors of the banks. Correlations between the factors and age, educational background, profession, length of involvement, and types of service obtained were identified to know the relationships. Results show that the most important service quality factor of banks is personal attention to the clients followed by error-free records, safety in transaction, and tangible physical facilities of the bank. Perceived service quality factors have significant relationship with the overall service quality of the banks located in Dhaka City which indicates that the factors identified have strong influence on the overall service quality.

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A Measurement of Customer Service Quality of Banks in Dhaka City of Bangladesh

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INTRODUCTION

Quality in service is very important especially for the growth and development of service sector business enterprises (Powell, 1995). It works as an antecedent of customer satisfaction (Ruyter and Bloemer, 1995). In past, quality was measured only for the tangible products because of less dominance of service sector in the economy. Due to the increasing importance of service sector in the economy, the measurement of service quality became important. ISO standards is one of the measurement tools of service quality, where quality is defined as the totality of features and characteristics of a product, process or service. Crosby (1979), a renowned researcher in service quality, defined quality as the 'conformance to requirements'. The guru of quality movement Juran (1988, 1992) defined quality as 'fitness for use' while, Deming (1986) viewed quality as a process promising to result in products or services.

In late 1980s, Parasuramam et al., (1985, 1991, 1994) explained quality as a gap between what customers feel should be offered and what is provided. Even though there is no single definition on quality, they all have a single focus on how users look at it (Fiji, 1994; Parasuraman, 1985; Teas, 1994; Zeithaml, 1988; Khader, 1997). In 1996, Ramaswamy identified three different sets of measures for service quality that a company should be concerned with (Ramaswamy, 1996):

* Service performance measures are primarily internally focused and evaluate the current performance and hence it is ensured that it continues to be reliable to meet the design specification;

* ...

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