Service Quality of the Select Commercial Banks in Salem City : An Empirical Study

In today's economy, companies want devoted and quality customers. The competitive market position and a good reputation of a company can quickly translate into market share and profit, but that distinction is often earned only through a philosophical commitment to service backed by diligent attention to what customers want and need. Developing close, co-operative relationship with customers is more important in the current era of intense competition and demanding customers. The quality of banking service is the end result of network designing, planning, engineering, operation, maintenance and the management of services delivered by the use of network and human resources to a customer. Banks are concentrating only on acquiring new customers. They seldom understand the importance and profitability of creating loyalty and retaining customers. For the last decade most banks have been so absorbed in their own internal issues, particularly merger-drives, cost cutting and re-engineering that customers and their relationship often received short shift. Banks have to come out with innovative measures to satisfy the needs of both the present and the potential customers at the same time adopt procedures to win back the lost customers. With this background, the researchers made an attempt to study the service quality of the select commercial banks in Salem City. This is an empirical study based on survey method. By adopting convenience sampling, 200 customers, i.e. 100 customers from Karur Vysya Bank and 100 customers from Canara Bank, were selected for this study. Customer care programme, establishment of customer complaints monitoring cell, customer satisfaction audit, home bank and appointment of trained relationship mangers will improve the service quality of select commercial banks. The long-term vision for ‘Indian banking system' to transform itself from being a domestic one to the global level may, at present sound far-fetched. Therefore the ‘Indian banking sector' should emerge stronger in line with the international standards at the same time to meet the national goals as well