Abstract:
Service quality continues to be a significant issue in the banking industry. Because
money and other financial services are generally undifferentiated produc{s, banks are
continually striving for increased service quality in order to achieve and maintain a
competitive edge through the customer satisfaction.
Authors of this paper discuss the service quality of banks on the basis of their customers'
perceptions, and analyse how gender differences of customers affect perceptions of
service quality dimensions such as responsiveness, assurance, tangibles, reliability, and
empathy and examine the overall effect to the customer satisfaction.
The sample of 460 retail banking customers from both private and public commercial
banks of Western Province was selected due to the resource limitation of carrying out the
research in island wide. Using the SERVQUAL instrument responses were gathered and
responses of the sample was examined using factor analysis and t-test to determine
whether gender differences are present in the sample and to what extent the influence of
gender of consumer impacts on customer satisfaction.
The results support the hypothesis that gender affects service quality perceptions and the
relative importance attached to various banking service quality dimensions. The female
respondents of the sample have shown a positive perception to empathy, responsiveness
and assurance with compared to male counterparts and male respondents are more
concerned on tangibles and reliability of the service quality and they were more inclined
to the process quality and product quality than the interaction quality.
This paper provides important information for bank managers to use in developing
operational, human resource, and marketing strategies, and in targeting those strategies in
terms of the gender differences in quality perceptions among their customers.
