It is crucial to understand the importance of customer satisfaction to a bank and its relationship to the financial success of the bank. Many banks do measure customer satisfaction in their own way but do not relate it to the financial bottom line of the bank.
The concept of "Customer Service" has attained great importance in the banks since the last six to eight years due to the setting up of the branches by many foreign banks and the starting of new generation Private Sector Banks like ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, UTI Bank. Even Public Sector Banks (PSBs) are facing tough competition from other PSBs, Private Sector Banks and Foreign Banks. The earlier watchword "Customer Service" should be excellent was changed to "Customer Delight" and currently it is "Customer Retention". To retain existing customers and attract more customers through word of mouth publicity from existing customers, banks have to measure the satisfaction level of the customers by conducting surveys at regular intervals and try to plug in the gaps.
Many of us opened our first bank account with the bank where our parents had their account and it was indeed a proud moment. However, with the passage of time many of us have changed our bank account to other "better" banks. Why did this shift happen? Was it a case of customer dissatisfaction? Such an investigation would reveal a lot of home truths. Unfortunately, the bank we moved from would have been a nationalized bank and the bank we moved to would most probably be a private bank. The dissatisfaction would have developed as we moved from a frugal student lifestyle to a working lifestyle and we expected a different set of services (satisfiers) and our expectations were different.
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