Customer Perceptions and Expectations of Service Quality in Banking Sector

India is one of the leading service providers and services sector contributed 62.5 percent to the GDP and employ 34 percent of the work force. The quality of service marketing is crucial to both the customer and the service firm. Customer perception is very important for customer decision-making in the services sector. If the customer does not perceive the services to be good, then all the efforts and the money spent by the service provider will be futile. Customer‟s expectations and experiences vary with services. When there is a shortfall between expectation of service level and perception of actual service delivery, it is called customer gap. In the present competitive Indian banking context, characterized by rapid change and increasingly sophisticated customers, it has become very important that banks in India determine the service quality factors, which are pertinent to the customer‟s selection process. With the advent of international banking, the trend towards larger bank holding companies and innovations in the marketplace, the customers have greater and greater difficulty in selecting one institution from another. Therefore the current problem for the banking industry in India is to determine the dimensionality of customer- perceived service quality.