Measuring Service Quality of Commercial Banks in an Underdeveloped Economy: A Study in Assam of North East India

Abstract

In the post-reform era, quality delivery of the services has acquired centre point of the service industry around the globe. The banking sector being purely a service-related industry has been influenced more by the issue of providing quality service. With the entry of private banks, the banking sector has gone through many transformations including the way services are extended. In a backward state like Assam, this has arrived a little late, but the changes are gradually visible. The chapter captures the service quality standard of the Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) and also for the different bank groups in order to make a comparison. The SERVPERF scale is used to study the replies of the customers in two cities, Guwahati and Tezpur, and some econometric tools are used to analyse the data. The study reveals that the private sector banks are far ahead of the public sector banks in terms of quality of service. The private banks influence the service quality of the SCBs the most among all the bank groups. Overall, the public sector banks, which are the dominant market players, will have to work hard to catch the level of the private banks.