Search quality in the financial services industry: a contingency perspective

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractFinancial services are inherently intangible and high on experience and credence qualities. In order to promote them effectively, a service provider must first identify the dimensions used by consumers to evaluate the service quality of banks prior to becoming a customer. Based on responses from customers of a credit union, the current study identifies four dimensionsempathy/assurance, tangibility, routine transaction cost, and loan transaction cost -which form the domain of consumer's evaluation of search quality in the financial services industry. Further, the relationships between these search quality factors and overall assessment of respondents' current bank is also investigated. The results indicate that higher levels of importance accorded to search quality factors, especially loan transaction costs, were associated with extreme (good or bad) assessment of current bank. The importance accorded to these search quality factors was also tested against contingency variables such as gender, marital status, age, household income, employment status, education, and house ownership. Of these, gender and home ownership emerged as the strongest determinants. These findings suggest that bank managers should be cognizant of search quality factors and their relations with the appropriate contingency variables.

The Impact of Service Quality on Customer Loyalty: A Study of Banks in Penang, Malaysia

“…Although there has been criticism from some other researchers to SERVQUAL instrument (Johnston, 1995), yet SERVQUAL is the instrument most utilized for its confirmatory factor analyses in most cases. Thus, up to date, SERVQUAL has proven to be a parsimonious model that has been used in various service organizations and industries to measure service quality including banks (Mc Alexander et al, 1994;Cowling & Newman, 1996;Levesque & Mc Dougall, 1996;Caruana et al, 2000;Caruana, 2002;Sureshchandar et al, 2002;Paswan et al, 2004;Seth et al, 2005;Lymperopoulos et al, 2006).…”

The influence of SERVQUAL dimensions on customer loyalty in banking sector, India - an empirical study

“…Thus, up to date, SERVQUAL has proven to be a stingy model that has been used in various service organisations and industries to measure service quality including banks (McAlexander et al, 1994;Cowling and Newman, 1996;Levesque and McDougall, 1996;Caruana et al, 2000;Caruana, 2002;Sureshchandar et al, 2002;Paswan et al, 2004;Seth et al, 2005;Lymperopoulos et al, 2006).…”

Cross-buying evaluations in the retail banking industry

“…Thus, not only will one-stop shopping deter customers from searching for other service providers (Storey & Easingwood, 1999), but also increase the possibility of cross-buying from existing customers (Lymberopoulos et al, 2004;Ngobo, 2004;Srinivasan, Anderson, & Ponnavolu, 2002). Actually, most banks have had the capability of providing one-stop shopping convenience to customers with traditional banking product categories (Paswan, Spears, Hasty, & Ganesh, 2004). However, not all banks are positioned to fully capitalize on cross-selling dissimilar product categories.…”