Consultative Selling and Its Impact on Customer Satisfaction in Banks:An Empirical Study on Indian Private Sectors Banks

Financial industries are experiencing a vulnerable phase to deal with the elevation of prevailing unethical sales practices resulting in the customer dissatisfaction. Consultative selling has been emerged as a problem solving selling approach. Researcher has undertaken this study to investigate the applicability of consultative selling on the customer satisfaction in banks. A conceptual framework model of consultative selling has been proposed and tested on 123 salespersons and 155 customers of select leading banks of Silchar city of Indian state of Assam. The proposed model is based on four dimensions of consultative selling and three important dimensions of customer satisfaction. Relationship among the variables has been tested using Pearson Correlation test. Results showed that all the four independent variables of consultative selling: Need identification, Knowledge & Expertise, Effective Communication & Problem solving have strong significant positive relationships with three dependent variables of customer satisfaction: Attentiveness, Helpfulness and Responsiveness. Study revealed that customer found consultative salespersons as attentive, helpful and responsive that helps to solve customer's problem and increases customer satisfaction level. Principle component analysis (PCA) has undertaken to extract the components that accelerate consultative selling in banks. Individual factor and Organizational factor have been extracted as two prominent components containing variables with high component loading that accelerate consultative selling in banks.