Service Quality in Retail Banking:Conceptualizing and Testing a Hierarchical Model

Service quality is a construct that has always drawn considerable attention and continues to draw attention with many generic as well as sector specific scales having been developed. Though an important antecedent of customer satisfaction and retention in retail banking, it has not been adequately conceptualized. This paper deals with conceptualization and validation of a multidimensional scale for measuring service quality in the retail banking context. Based on literature review, service quality attributes were identified and an item pool was generated during the qualitative phase of study. The survey was conducted among retail banking customers in Kerala. The confirmatory factor analysis and PLS based structural equation modeling shows that retail banking service quality is a first order reflective second order formative construct consisting of five dimensions.