Relationships among Information Technology, Service Quality, and Overall Satisfaction of the Customers in Life Insurance Corporation of India

Introduction

In 21^st century information technology (IT) has become the backbone of every industry, especially for the service industries, all over the world where service quality plays an important role in the customization process of service delivery, improvement of the productivity and profitability of the organizations as well as in the satisfaction process of the customers of the organizations. Satisfaction of the customers comes only when their needs and wants are fulfilled. Rust and Oliver (1994) explained the customer satisfaction as “a summary of cognitive and affective reaction to a service incident (or sometimes to a long-term service relationship). Satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) results from experiencing a service quality encounter and comparing that encounter with what was expected”. Considering the various needs and requirements of customers, organizations are now concerned in providing quality of services to their customers in order to meet the expectations of the customers. Due to the effect of the several factors of the globalization, customers’ socio-economic culture have already been changed and become very much dependent on the information technology. Realizing this, the service industries are now trying to get competitive advantage over their competitors through the use of information technology and information technology enabled services (ITES). After liberalization, Indian insurance market has undergone a dramatic change and also influenced the financial sector as a whole. Along with one and only public sector company namely Life Insurance Corporation of India (LICI), many other private life insurance companies performing their operations in Indian insurance market and offering various types of products to their customers. After the entrance of private and foreign insurance companies in the Indian insurance market, the customers’ perception of quality of services from the insurance companies has also changed. From the very early age of the business, the largest public life insurance company in India namely LIC has not only implemented information technology in their operations and providing various ITES to their customers but also adopted various strategies to modernize their present IT infrastructure. In order to survive in the future and to achieve maximum growth in the present competitive insurance market, life insurance companies are now dedicatedly involved in the development of new strategies for the purpose of the customer satisfaction through the proper improvement of service quality with the help of information technology in the efficient manner. In the present context, the current study has been conducted on the customers of all the 17 branches of the LICI located in the district of Burdwan to observe the significant relationships among the information technology, service quality and overall satisfaction of these LIC customers.