Service Quality of Public Sector Banks in India A Gap Between Perception and Expectation

The Indian banking system consists of 26 public sector banks, 20 private sector banks, 43 foreign banks, 56 regional rural banks, 1, 589 urban cooperative banks and 93, 550 rural cooperative banks, in addition to cooperative credit institutions as on 1^st February 2016. Within this competitive banking ecosystem, the customer's perception for public sector banks valued a lot for it. The researcher in this paper tries to describe a conceptual framework of service quality of selected public sector banks in the city of Berhampur. The researcher used SERQUAL questionnaire having two parts i.e. Expectation and Perception. There are 22 questions under five dimensions of service quality. In order to find the perceived service quality the mean score was obtained which showed that “Tangibility ”had the highest value in expectation with 4.216 followed by Assurance, Responsiveness, Reliability and finally Empathy at least. Similarly on the perception side “Empathy ”had highest value with 6.355 followed by Tangibility, Responsiveness, Reliability and finally Assurance. The maximum gap between Perception and Expectation is for “Empathy ”with 3.240 while lowest is for Assurance with 1.570. This research has some limitations as the results shows the perceived service quality of customer of one city only. The data can also be collected from villages to find and improve the perceived service quality of banks.