SERVICE QUALITY EVALUATION IN LATVIAN BANKING

Abstract

The competitive power of a bank is largely defined by the degree of its conformance to customerneeds. Thus, customer satisfaction and loyalty are critically important factors to achieve long-term businessprosperity in banking. In turn, customer satisfaction depends on provided service quality and its perception bycustomers. The goal of the research is to take the opinions of Latvian citizens about the service quality inLatvian banks. Besides, the aim was to compare bank customers’ and employees’ perceptions of servicequality and to evaluate the gap. To achieve these goals, the authors used their own developed questionnaires.To evaluate bank service quality, SERVPERF and weighted SERVPERF models were applied. Dataprocessing was conducting with SPSS and AQUAD programs. The scientific contribution of the authors isdevelopment and approbation of the qualitative instrument for measuring service quality that can be used bybank managers to make right marketing decisions.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.17.1.2282