1Business Administration, N.M.S.s.V.N. College, Madurai. Tamilnadu.
2Department of Management Studies, Madurai Kamaraj University. Madurai, Tamilnadu.
The applicability of two measures SERVQUAL and SERVPERF in the measurement of service quality in Indian banking is focused in the study. The results indicate that the SERVQUAL scale provides more diagnostic information rather than the SERVPERF scale. The five-factor conceptualization of SERVQUAL does not seem to be totally applicable. The higher discriminant validity of SERVPERF indicates supremacy of the scale for the measurement of overall service quality whereas there is no significant difference between these two scales regarding their convergent validity. By the predictive ability of the scales, the SERVPERF scale on various services quality factors explained more than the SERVQUAL scale. The significant differences among the customer in Public and private sector banks are more clearly identified by the SERVPERF scale than the SERVQUAL scale. The four scales generated in the present study are significantly different to explain the service quality in Indian banking. The study concludes that the SERVPERF Scale is better than the SERVQUAL scale to measure the service quality in Indian banking.
Service Quality is widely accepted as the factor in achieving competitive advantage in most service industries. Regulatory, structural, and technological factors are significantly changing the banking environment throughout the world. Regulatory changes especially after globalization have reduced or eliminated barriers to cross-border expansion, creating a more integrated global banking market. Structural changes have led to a great errange of activities, enabling them to be comemore competitive with non-bank financial institutions. Technological changes are causing banks to restructure their strategies for services offered to corporate, commercial and domestic customers' service quality and customer satisfaction are compelling the attention of all banking institutions in the changing environment.
Although the concepts of customer satisfaction and service quality are obviously related, the focus of this paper is on service quality. Further, in cognizance of the relative paucity of studies on developing economies in the context of service quality in the banking sector, this paper attempts to contribute in this regard by focusing on the banking sector of Indian economy. It accomplishes this by assessing the applicability of two important service quality measures namely, SERVQUAL and SERVPERF as discussed in Parasuraman etal., (1988) and; Cronin and Taylor, (1992) to a developing economy, India.
