Case Study : a Letter to the Bank Manager

For many companies, customer service is summarised in the following activities: responding to customer questions, receives commands, resolve disagreements about billing and handle claims. The service can be made directly at the customer’s house, at the supplier or through the media (telephone, fax, email, Internet, etc.) The increasing number of call centres demonstrates the importance that companies attach to customer service.

Service quality is one area which was studied extensively for the past four decades. In the field of service marketing, there are many definition for service quality. Parasuraman et al, (1988) defines service quality as a discrepancy between customers’ expectation and perception of a service or service experience and this is basically the perceived service quality. Based on this concept, Parasuraman et al. (1985), developed a model known as the SERVQUAL. The SERVQUAL model is based on 22-item scale and it measures service quality based on five dimensions which are reliability, responsiveness, tangibility, assurance and empathy. According to Parasuraman et. al (1985) these five dimension are generic and they are applicable across the industries. However, there are some critics to this model also such as Gronroos (1990) and Mangold and Babakus (1991) who opines that SERVQUAL solely focuses on the service delivery process while neglecting the outcome of the service. Interestingly, the inventors of SERVQUAL suggested the importance of both the functional and technical aspect of service quality in the model (Parasuraman et.al, 1985). However, they didn’t include the technical aspect but it in the instrument. The emphasis on the functional aspect is basically the American school which was

The Gaps Model of Service Quality was originally developed for application in the financial service sector. The model was

Objective: To find out the risk of customers using bank accounts and provide methods for mitigation of the highest priority residual risk.

My main recommendation is for this and most banks to own up and realize that they make mistakes. When you look over the twitter account you realize that they are trying to do just that. When the tweets do not seem too much like a robot they address problems tweeted at them from disgruntled customers.

Hung, Y. H., Huang, M. L., & Chen, K. S. (2003). Service quality evaluation by service quality performance matrix. Total Quality Management and Business Excellence.

The key to ensuring good quality service is meeting or exceeding what the customers expect from services. Judgements of high and low quality depend on how customers the actual service performance in the context of what they expected. Service quality, as perceived by the customers, can be defined as the extent of discrepancy but customers’ expectations or desires and their

Lastly, all of these shortcomings to the conventional system prolong the time it takes for a customer to deposit a check and receive the funds. Ultimately, any process improvements must create a positive customer experience and reduce added exposure to both the customer and the banks.

In order to understand service quality and models proposed to assess it, Seth, Deshmukh, & Vrat (2005) conducted a literature review of the service quality models and examined 19 different service quality models. Their paper summarized different models and highlighted the strengthens and weakness of each model. The authors conclude that while none of models were able to address all aspects of measurements and selection of a model to measure service quality would be dependent on the subject that the researcher wished to measure.

People: While more and more of our banking takes place electronically, customer service is still important when we experience problems or need help with some aspect of our banking.

Good customer service is all about bringing customers back. Due to intangibility, the customers can’t feel the service, and thus causes lack of confidence of customers to the services. Therefore, the business should ensure that they provide a good, nice, friendly and professional service to the clients. The essence of good customer service is forming a relationship with customers – a relationship that that individual customer feels that he would like to pursue. The staff must ensure that they consistently do these things:

Service quality is defined as the procedure where an organization meets the customers/clients expectations and challenges. This step is taken by the company to improve the quality and needs of customers.

These unpleasant incidents, like overcharging influenced the relationship between the bank and the customer. The actions that the customers

Service quality is a measurable set of standard established upon by a provider in delivering services to a client/customer. It can also be viewed upon as a degree of both tangible and intangible expectation coming from a customer’s perspective on how these services are realized by the supplier or by the product coming from the provider.

Obviously, from a Best Value point of view the measuring of service quality in the service segment ought to consider client desires of service and also impression of service. Be that as it may, as Robinson (1999) postulated that: "It is clear that there is little agreement of supposition and much contradiction about how to gauge service quality". One service quality estimation show that has been widely used is the SERVQUAL model created by Parasuraman et al . (1985, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1993, 1994; Zeithaml et al. , 1990). SERVQUAL as the frequently utilized tool for measuring service quality has been to look at clients ' desires before an service experience and their impression of the real service conveyed