The impact of Internet on service quality in the banking
sector

Abstract: With the continuous growth of competition in the market place, understanding
customers has become more and more important method of marketing. Research
has shown that high service quality contributes significantly to
profitability. In search of competitive advantage, both practitioners and
academics are keen on accurately measuring service quality in order to
better understanding its essential antecedents and consequences, and
ultimately establish methods for improving service quality. Now days, the
incredible growth of the Internet is changing the way corporations conduct
business with consumers who are increasingly expecting higher services,
becoming time saved and wanting more convenience. However, due to the
services’ intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability of
production and consumption, service quality becomes hard to evaluate.
Therefore, based on the literature review, the five most frequently
mentioned dimensions used in evaluating services were chosen in present
study as: reliability, responsiveness, security, communication and access.
An attempt has been made in present paper is to gain a better understanding
of how Internet affects service quality in the banking sector. A qualitative
research was adapted and case studies were conducted from both customer and
banking perspectives in this study. Additionally, personal interview was
selected as the source for data collection. The result of the present study
shows that the Internet is a convenience tool available whenever and
wherever customers need it. It is also found that the Internet has improved
the factors in service quality like responsiveness, communication and
access. It is concluded that the Internet has an important and positive
effect on customer perceived banking services and the service quality has
been improved since the Internet has been used in banking sector.
Furthermore, the study offers suggestions to banking managers to allocate
their resources on the dimensions i.e., reliability, responsiveness,
security, communication and access to improve service quality according to
its relative importance since the Internet has been used.