Assessing the Relationship between Service Quality and Customer’s Propensity to Switch Brands in the Banking Industry of Bangladesh

Abstract

The significance of banks and other financial institutions is highlighted by the contribution they make to the economic development of a country. With a number of state-owned, private-owned and foreign banks in Bangladesh, it reflects the wide range of options available to the customers, indicating the presence of severe competition. Such relentless competition in the banking industry of Bangladesh has led banks to seek ways to differentiate their services in the market, ultimately aiming to satisfy customers and preventing them to switch to a competing brand. Despite the efforts, banks are constantly hounded by the challenge of customers moving to another organization in search for better products and services. As expressed by the literary work of various academicians and researchers, service quality plays a vital role in determining the possibility of customers to switch. This research therefore, aims to investigate whether the components of service quality identified by the Servqual model discourage customers’ willingness to switch to another brand. Based on the analysis of diverse literature, hypotheses were developed and in order to test those, primary data collected from 250 respondents were analyzed through SPSS. Eventually, the findings reveal that the service quality dimensions positively influence customer satisfaction, which in turn are negatively associated with customers’ brand switching intention. Furthermore, the dimensions directly, without using customer satisfaction as a mediating factor, also have negative relationship with brand switching intentions. However, in the analysis, amongst all the dimensions of service quality only one element (i.e. responsiveness) was found less significant.

Keywords: service quality, customer satisfaction, and brand switching intention