An assessment of service quality: a study on retail banking services of India post

Customer satisfaction is a key mediating factor for organisations’ profitability. Satisfied customers exhibit loyalties, repeat purchase and communicate favourably leading to improved organisational performance. Customer satisfaction is an outcome of product/service quality. Disconfirmation theory posits that satisfaction is achieved when post purchase performance exceeds pre purchase expectation. Assessing quality of service, having distinguishing elements of intangibility, variability and inseparability, is difficult and therefore, is assessed not only by the service outcome but also by the production and delivery process and by the peripherals related to the service. SERVQUAL model, which is essentially a comparison between the expectation and actual service quality level on 5 dimensions i.e. Tangibility, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy, is extensively used to study the service quality level. This paper also uses this model to study service quality gap in retail banking services of India Post. The study finds gaps in the service quality level in all the 5 dimensions. The gaps are more pronounced in the Tangibility, Responsiveness and Empathy dimensions. Whereas, the gaps in certain items of Reliability and Assurance like “dependable”, “record accuracy”, “trust” and “feel safe transaction” are significant but lower than other items.