The impact of Internet on service quality in the banking sector

With the continuous growth of competition in the market place, understanding customers has become more and more important method of marketing. Research has shown that high service quality contributes significantly to profitability. In search of competitive advantage, both practitioners and academics are keen on accurately measuring service quality in order to better understanding its essential antecedents and consequences, and ultimately establish methods for improving service quality. Now days, the incredible growth of the Internet is changing the way corporations conduct business with consumers who are increasingly expecting higher services, becoming time saved and wanting more convenience. However, due to the services’ intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability of production and consumption, service quality becomes hard to evaluate. Therefore, based on the literature review, the five most frequently mentioned dimensions used in evaluating services were chosen in present study as: reliability, responsiveness, security, communication and access. An attempt has been made in present paper is to gain a better understanding of how Internet affects service quality in the banking sector. A qualitative research was adapted and case studies were conducted from both customer and banking perspectives in this study. Additionally, personal interview was selected as the source for data collection. The result of the present study shows that the Internet is a convenience tool available whenever and wherever customers need it. It is also found that the Internet has improved the factors in service quality like responsiveness, communication and access. It is concluded that the Internet has an important and positive effect on customer perceived banking services and the service quality has been improved since the Internet has been used in banking sector. Furthermore, the study offers suggestions to banking managers to allocate their resources on the dimensions i.e., reliability, responsiveness, security, communication and access to improve service quality according to its relative importance since the Internet has been used.Validerat; 20101217 (root