An Empirical Study to Build a Theoretical Framework that Can Determine Customer Satisfaction in Terms of People, Process & Physical Evidence

Effective service marketing is a complex activity that involves many different strategies, skills, tasks and activities. Customers perceive services in terms of quality of the service and how satisfied they are overall with their experiences. It will be easier for the marketers if they know what their present or potential customers think about their services in terms of the service specific 3Ps (People, Process, Physical Evidence). If the relationship between customer satisfaction and the customers' perception of the 3Ps can be identified, it would be much easier to close the providers' gaps described by the GAP Model of service marketing. This paper describes an empirical investigation involving retail banking services. Opinions of customers in and around Kolkata have been collected on some pre-defined variables linked with the 3Ps & statistical analysis has been used to identify key factors on which the customer satisfaction regarding the banking services depends. Thereafter a quantitative relationship among the key factors & customer satisfaction has been established to provide a guideline to close service providers' gap in the context of banking & financial service sector