کیفیت خدمات و رضایت مشتری در بانک های خرده فروشی غانی: نقش تعدیل کننده قیمت Service quality and customer satisfaction in Ghanaian retail banks: the moderating role of price

Introduction The quest for service quality has been an essential strategic consideration for banks attempting to survive and prosper in today’s hyper competitive environment. Research has demonstrated that service quality is positively related to customer satisfaction (Gera, 2011), customer loyalty (Siddiqi, 2011), financial performance (Agathee, 2010; Jain and Gupta, 2004) and competitive advantage (Wang et al., 2003; Kelley et al., 2002). This makes the subject of service quality an important area of business research (Mersha et al., 2012; Kumar et al., 2009), and prompted Sangeetha and Mahalingam (2011) to conclude that service quality has been at the fore front of academic and practitioner research in services marketing. Service quality in retail banking has been well researched and an over flogged research area (Mersha et al., 2012; Abdullah et al, 2011; Aldlaigan and Buttle, 2002). A search through the literature reveals that various models and scales have emerged in the literature on the subject. These include the well- known SERVQUAL model (Parasuraman et al., 1988; Mersha et al., 2012; Kumar et al., 2009), the BSQ model (Bahia and Nantel, 2000; Abdullah et al., 2011) and the SYSTRAC-SQ model (Aldilaigan and Buttle, 2002). Recently, this stream of research has even been extended to include retail bank hybrid services (Ganguli and Roy, 2010) and electronic platforms (Narteh, 2013a; Katono, 2011). A comprehensive review by Sangeetha and Mahalingam, (2011) has shown that as at 2006, as many as 14 models have been used to measure retail bank services quality. Choudhury, (2013) after an extensive study of retail bank service quality and purchase intentions, recommended the need to modify existing scales in order to provide a better measure of bank service quality. A review of the extant literature revealed that researchers have adopted or adapted the existing models without any attempt at integrating them in order to measure retail bank service quality. Moreover, Brick et al., (2010) after studying retail bank service quality in 10 African countries concluded that service quality perceptions vary among countries in Africa and called for specific country studies to provide further insight into customer perceptions of service quality. A review of the literature indicates that apart from the works of (Hinson et al., 2006; Okoe et al., 2013), not much has been done in the subject area. To cap it all, Sangeetha and Mahalingam (2011) concluded from their reviews that the relative importance of the service quality dimensions varied across cultural contexts and called for country-specific studies that could address the issue of service quality dimensions in retail banks. Moreover, prior studies have often assumed a direct relationship between service quality dimensions and customer satisfaction (Landhari et al., 2011; Priluck and Lala, 2009). The moderators of this relationship have often been ignored even though literature argues that price expectations for instance, influence service quality perceptions of customers (Toncar et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2006). This means that actual price paid for services by customers could impact on their service quality perceptions but this price-quality relationship has often been under studied (Kim et al., 2006). The current study proposes to address these research gaps. First, we integrate the SERVQUAL model (Parasuraman et al., 1988) and the BSQ model (Bahia and Nantel, 2000), two of the dominant models to measure retail bank service quality and customer satisfaction. Secondly, we moderated the relationship with price in order to help rekindle the old argument of price-quality expectation among customers. Such a study will provide bank managers with further and deeper insight into service quality, price expectations and customer satisfaction with retail bank services.