Service Quality And Its Impact On Customer Satisfaction: An Empirical Evidence From The Pakistani Banking Sector

Abstract

This comparative research was designed to investigate the impact of service quality on customer satisfaction in the Pakistani banking sector. Hypothesis developed for the study was higher level of service quality leads to higher level of customer satisfaction. A sample of two hundred respondents, (one hundred from a foreign bank and one hundred from a public sector / nationalized bank located in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad) was drawn on the basis of simple random sampling. Various constructs of SERVQUAL model developed by Zeithaml and Bitner (1996) and five point customer satisfaction tool developed by Taylor and Baker (1994) were adopted and used for data collection. Data were analyzed through SPSS version 14. Results of the regression analysis indicated that service quality was proved to be a strong predictor of customer satisfaction in case of the foreign bank with the R² value of 0.644 accepting research hypothesis and rejecting null hypothesis as compared value R² of 0.156 that does not support the research hypothesis in case of public sector bank. The study concluded that service quality, if managed effectively, can contribute significantly towards customer satisfaction.