The paper focuses on the service quality and customer satisfaction among the private, public and foreign banks in India. An analysis is carried out to examine the level of awareness among customers and to identify the best sector which provides qualitative customer service. This becomes relevant in the context of recommendations of various committees constituted by the Government of India and the RBI, from time to time, to suggest measures to improve customer service systems of the public sector commercial banks of India. A well-structured questionnaire is used to collect the views of respondents across the three banking sectors. The survey instrument includes various dimensions, pertaining to the quality of customer services in terms of banking personnel, convenient working hours, Web-based services, error free value-added services and efficient grievance redressal mechanism etc. Apart from the basic statistical tools such as measures of central tendency, The authors also use `factor analysis' and the `One-way Anova' classification. The idea behind this is to extract the relevant factors and analyze whether there is any significant difference with respect to service quality within the three banking sectors. The results indicate that the level of awareness among the customers improved significantly during the study period. It is interesting to note that the results are consistent with the previous studies conducted on customer service aspects, and it has been observed that the foreign and the new generation private sector banks are serving the customers better.

Global banking scenario is currently undergoing radical transformation owing to the liberalization, privatization and globalization measures, introduced by the various economies of the world and Indian banking industry is no exception to the ongoing trend. Prior to liberalization of the economy, public sector commercial banks in India functioned in a protected environment and the banking transactions were simple characterized by less competition and customer orientation. The phenomenon of globalization brought about significant changes in terms of products and services that are being offered to Indian customers and consequently the complexion of the banking sector in India too underwent a noteworthy change in the last decade.

The entry of information technology into the banking industry has created a revolution and it has prompted public sector commercial banks of India to design world-class customer service systems and practices, to meet the growing customer needs. Indian banks are realizing that their internal administrative systems have to be geared up to face the unprecedented changes that are taking place in the environment due to global forces. The emergence of new private sector and foreign banks is one of the major challenges before the public sector commercial banks in India and this prompted the Indian banking industry to reckon with the challenges posed by the competition while rendering services to the customers.

A Comparative Study on the Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction among Private, Public and Foreign Banks,qualitative customer, customer service, recommendations, RBI, service systems, commercial banks, respondents,banking sectors, survey instrument, banking personnel, Web-based services, value-added services,statistical tools, central tendency, factor analysis, relevant factors,service aspects, larger implications, delivery aspects.