The retail banking sector in India is undergoing sweeping changes due to heightened competition and the initiation of modern technology. Today, customers have become more aware than what they were in the past, and as a result, are continuously looking for better quality services from the retail banks that can provide them with satisfaction. The present study helps in the identification of the factors (or relationship dimensions) that are responsible for the satisfaction of the customers, and also enables the assessment of the influencing power of these factors. This, in turn, would help in the enhancement of the relationship between the retail banks and their customers, and thus aid the decision makers of these banks to identify the major factors that determine the satisfaction of their customers.

Customer satisfaction has been an important theoretical and practical issue for most marketing practitioners and consumer researchers since the 1970s (Churchill and Surprenant, 1982; Dabholkar et al., 1996; Fournier and Mick, 1999; Jones and Suh, 2000, p. 147; and Meuter et al., 2000). All through the 1980s, researchers relied on customer satisfaction and quality ratings obtained from surveys for performance monitoring, compensation, as well as resource allocation (Bolton, 1998), and began to look into the determinants of customer satisfaction (Swan and Trawick, 1981; Churchill and Surprenant, 1982; and Bearden and Teel, 1983). This interest is driven to a certain extent by the belief that customer satisfaction can have long-term benefits including customer loyalty and increased profitability (Oliver, 1980; Bearden and Teel, 1983; LaBarbera and Mazursky, 1983; Oliver and Swan, 1989; Bolton and Drew, 1991; Anderson and Sullivan, 1993; Rust and Zahorik, 1993; Anderson et al., 1994; Anderson et al., 1997; and Rust et al., 2002). Furthermore, a basic notion of marketing is that a customer's satisfaction with a product, in all possibility, leads to repeat purchases, acceptance of product line extensions, and favorable word-of-mouth advertising (Cardozo, 1965).

It is not surprising, then, that mission statements of organizations are usually created around the notion of customer satisfaction. This has been considered as a vital input for success in today's exceedingly competitive business environment. The importance of customer satisfaction in strategy development for customer and market-oriented firms cannot be undermined. In today's highly competitive and increasingly consolidated world, offering personalized and differentiating services can be critical to a bank's success.

Retail banks have been measuring customer satisfaction and service quality to determine how well they are meeting customer needs and requirements (Dabholkar, 1995). Banking is a customer-oriented services industry; therefore, the customer is the center of attention and customer service is the distinguishing factor (Jham and Khan, 2008).

Management Research Journal, Customer Satisfaction, Retail Banking Sector, Empirical Study, Retail Banking, Financial Services Sector, Demographic Factors, Marketing Strategy, Retail Banking Services, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin, KMO, Null Hypothesis, Multiple Regression Analysis, Variance Inflation Factor, VIF, Service Quality.