The Importance of People on Delivering Service Quality :   A study in Svenska Handelsbanken of Gävle

Abstract: Aim: Banks in Sweden appear extend through different distribution channels. The role of branch banking has changed to provide advisory services and sell the banks' products and service which is an approach involves the people interactions. Service employees are associated with the organization service quality and customer satisfaction. A comprehensive human resource strategy thus can help the organization develop a more customer-orientation employee, in order to deliver service quality.  With the help of the human resources strategies wheel (Wilson et al., 2008), how a bank develop people to deliver service quality will be showed, which finally lead to the purpose of this paper - revealing the importance of people on delivering service quality. Method: By reading relevant literatures, the theory about service culture and human resource strategy is defined. Svenska Handelsbanken chose to be the research object. Its decentralized organization which focuses on the interplay between strong branches, highly-trained specialists and efficient support functions is useful to this research. Through face-to-face interview with branch managers, a holistic view of the situation in bank will be showed, additionally, detail information can be digging out. Result & Conclusions: The human resources strategies used by Handelsbanken is a process generally including hire the right people, provides effective and sufficient training and needed support systems, retain the best people. As a result, this research indicates with the service culture which establishes deeply inside the organization; Handelsbanken realizes the important of people on delivering service quality. And then by choosing the right people, training them, supporting them, and retaining them as a serious of human resources strategies, the service quality is delivered. In addition, the authors find out the relation among service culture, human resources strategies and people work as a triangle, constraining and assisting each other. Suggestions for future research: One of the limitations of this thesis is lack of employee perception. Another is hard to find a lot of information about the unique reward system in Handelsbanken - Oktogonen Fundation in English. The document is in Swedish so that the authors only can get general information from the annual report 2008 of the bank. The suggestion for future research is to conduct a study which it includes bank perspective and employee perspective. Contribution of the thesis: The contribution of this study is to show how importance of people in service quality delivery by complementing a framework which is integrated service culture and human resource strategies.