An assessment of retail customers' perception of service quality

Amid intense competition and the dynamic business environment, surviving in the market has become a key challenge for many service organisations. Service quality has become one of the key tools for surviving and gaining competitive advantage in banking industry, since its offering comprised mainly of intangible elements. Thus service quality has taken considerable interest in marketing literature. The banks perception of service quality may be quite different from what retail customers perceive as service quality. It is therefore, important for the bank to understand customer¿s perception of service quality in the light of great competition, numerous customer complaints and movement of customers from one bank to another. To address this research issue, a research framework based on a modified SERVQUAL scale as the foundation of the theoretical basis was used to probe customer¿s perception of service quality. In addition to the original variables of SERVQUAL scale, namely tangibility, responsiveness, empathy, assurance, reliability, other variables such as convenience image, access and ATM effectiveness were integrated into the model.