COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN INDIAN
PUBLIC SECTOR AND PRIVATE SECTOR BANKS




INDIAN RETAIL BANKING ENVIRONMENT

The commercial Banks in India comprise both public
sector as well as private sector banks. In an initiative
towards bringing about reforms in the financial sector,
overall development in the economy along with reforms in
industry, trade, taxation, external sector, banking and
financial markets have been carried out since mid 1991. It
took almost 10 years for the Indian economy to strengthen
its footing and bring about a sea change in the way
financial institutions in the country work today. It is
because of the sustained and gradual pace of reforms that
has helped us in avoiding any crisis and has actually
fuelled growth. As pointed out in the RBI Annual Report
2001-02, GDP growth in the 10 years after reforms i.e.
1992-93 to 2001-02 averaged 6.0% against 5.8% recorded
during 1980-81 to 1989-90 in the pre-reform period. After
almost 7% growth in 2008/09 fiscal year, in the first three
months of 2010 India's economy expanded 8.6% boosted
by industrial production and services.



RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The objective of this descriptive research is to explore the
dimensions of customer perceived service quality in the
context of the Indian retail banking industry. A set of
service quality parameters, drawn from servqual model
(Parasuraman et al., 1984, 1988) have been used to
understand customer satisfaction with respect to public
and private sector banks. The SERVQUAL method from
Valarie A. Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, and Leonard L.
Berry is a trusted technique that can be used for
performing a gap analysis of an organization's service
quality performance against customer service quality
needs. SERVQUAL takes into account the perceptions of
customers of the relative importance of service attributes.
This allows an organization to prioritize and to use its
resources to improve the most critical service attributes.


DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

The respondents were contacted on a personal basis as
well as through email. Their experience was captured
through the questionnaire. Analysis of the information has
been done by using the statistical package SPSS version
15. Different tools like Mean, Standard Deviation and TTest
have been used. Conclusion and findings have been
derived from analysis and interpretation of data.
Descriptive analysis has been done to depict the
perception of the respondents to study their perception on
the variables of service quality. The analysis of the means
& the standard deviation of these variables are depicted in
the table below:



CONCLUSION
The Indian banking sector has witnessed heightened
competition with so many banks coming up with all their
potential and using their global strength to their advantage
in order to establish themselves in the market. Private
Banks seem to have satisfied its customers with good
services and they have been successful in retaining its
customers by providing better facilities than Public sector
Banks. But, still Private Banks need to go a long way to
become customer’s first preference. In an economy of
innovative technologies and changing markets, each and
every service quality variable has become important. New
financial products and services have to be continuously
introduced in order to stay competent.