Determining the Degree of Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: An Empirical Study of Retail Banking in Ghana

Abstract

The intangible nature of services makes it difficult for an organisation to understand how its customers perceive and evaluate the quality of its services. The pressing need for banks to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty makes it imperative for them to assess their service quality levels. The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty among retail banking customers in Ghana. The GAP analysis technique was applied to help in identifying the strengths or deficiencies in the service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty levels, as judged by respondents. The results showed that the extent of Service Quality in Ghana’s banking industry is reasonably high. Also, the extent of Customer Satisfaction, which was rated, based on the single item question, recorded a higher rating over and above service quality. The mean score for Overall Customer Loyalty was 5.08 (Gap score=1.92), indicating a slightly high rate of customer loyalty among bank customers in Ghana. Overall, Customer Loyalty has a relatively high Gap score of 1.92, compared with Service Quality (Gap = 1.75) and customer satisfaction (Gap of 1.50). This points to the existence of lower levels of customer loyalty for the Ghana banking industry, followed by service quality and then customer satisfaction. The study further concluded that the Ghanaian banks should particularly pay attention to behavioural loyalty to help improve on the overall customer loyalty.