Customer service expectations in retail banking in South Africa

Customer satisfaction and retention are critical for retail banks. Service qualityis a major determinant of customer satisfaction, and is increasingly being seenas a key strategic differentiator within the financial services sector worldwide.However, little is known about service quality in an African context for retailbanking.This research assesses customer expectations based on service quality factorsfor retail banks across ten countries in Africa. Specifically, the objectives are todetermine whether cross-national differences in customer service expectationsexist in the African retail banking sector, what the relative importance of keyservice dimensions in African retail banking are, and whether these serviceexpectations are constant over time.A questionnaire based survey of 4035 respondents across ten African countrieswas used. The determinants of external service quality were identified, whichinclude service quality dimensions and respective underlying attributes. TheSERVQUAL model developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry (1990) wasadopted for modelling the data. The results were rescaled to interval data andthen analysed by way of ANOVA testing, t-testing and rank ordering.The research shows, with the exception of the Responsiveness serviceexpectation dimension, that there are no commonalities of service expectationsamong the African countries of this study. The implications of this are significantfor managers of multinational retail banks in Africa wishing to improve the quality of service delivery.The Responsiveness service expectation dimension was found to consistentlybe the most important expectation across all countries. Thereafter, the relativeimportance of subsequent service dimensions varied considerably for eachcountry, but, on average, ranked as follows: Responsiveness, Reliability,Tangibles, Assurance and, finally, Empathy.