Proceedings of 3rd Asia-Pacific Business Research Conference
25 - 26 February 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISBN: 978-1-922069-19-1
Gap Analysis in the Service Performance of the
New Generation Private Banks in Chennai Mega
City: An Empirical Study
C.Natarajan*
The importance of service quality in contributing to the development
of banking relationships is well acknowledged within the relationship
banking literature. Hence, banks focus on service quality as a core
competitive strategy. Service quality offers a way of achieving
success among competing services, particularly in banks, where
establishing service quality may be the only way of differentiating
oneself. Excellent customer service can improve the bank's ability to
lure affluent prospects, elevate the bank's profitability, lower bank
operation costs, and/or creates greater customer loyalty. In this
context, the researcher has made an attempt to study the perception
of the customers towards service quality of the new generation
private banks in Chennai Mega City. The present study is empirical
in character, based on survey method. In order to collect primary
data for the purpose of the study, multi-stage sampling technique is
adopted. At the first stage, 3 new generation private banks which
outnumber in number of branches were selected out of the 8 new
generation private banks. In the second stage, 10 per cent of the
branches i.e. 16 branches were selected out of the 3 selected new
generation private banks. In the final stage, from each of the
branches, 30 savings bank accountholders and 10 current
accountholders were selected on the purposive basis for the study.
Therefore, the sample size consists of 640 customers. To study the
perception of the customers, chi-square test, analysis of variance,
student t test, paired comparison t-test, analysis of co-efficient of
variation, discriminant function analysis, multiple discriminant
function analysis, multiple regression analysis and percentage
analysis have been employed. The findings of the study revealed
that there is a significant difference in the acceptance level of the
respondents between the expected and perceived levels of various
dimensions of service quality. The researcher suggests measures
such as customer intimate strategy, training to employees, highquality customer service, customer communication, creativity and
innovativeness, conduct of customer contact programmes,
establishment of customer compliant monitoring cell, providing up
date information, improving reliability, customer segment specific
strategies, staff involvement, provisions of prompt service and
understanding the customers to improve the service quality of the
new generation private banks in Chennai Mega City.
Field of Research: Banking.
*
Assistant Professor of Commerce, Directorate of Distance Education, Annamalai
University, Annamalai Nagar – 608 002, Tamil Nadu, India.
E-mail: rajan_aucdm@yahoo.com