Empirical Study of Level of Customer Service at Commercial Banks

In the contemporary customer centric scenario, the main driver of banks’ success and endurance is satisfying the ever increasing demands and expectations of the customers. To assess the customer service standards in banks, this paper is a study of the level of customer service attained by scheduled commercial banks with respect to the guidelines issued by the Reserve Bank of India. The objective is to find the key challenges and gaps in fulfilling the customer needs based on a comparison of initiatives taken by the public sector, private sector and foreign banks. Keeping in view the banker-customer interface on a regular basis, the authors have studied the customer (bank) attributes of satisfaction vis-à-vis the guidelines given by the regulator. Samples have been collected through questionnaires with respect to 16 attributes and the data has been interpolated in variant terms.

A pilot study of 32 banks revealed that banks face a lot of challenges in delivering the service to the customers, especially because of negligence in terms of awareness of the instructions given by RBI. It is therefore recommended that the banks should make serious efforts to educate the officials and customers about these policies and circulars and wide publicity should be given to them.