Responsiveness as antecedent of satisfaction and referrals in financial services marketing: Empirical evidence from an emergent economy

Abstract

Financial institutions across the globe are still recovering from the meltdown of 2008 and several nations continue their struggle to stabilize national economies. However, there might be some important lessons to be learned from this debacle. Some economies, notably the emergent ones, were more resilient to this slowdown than the developed ones. In fact, the banking sector in some of these economies posted a robust growth in spite of the downturn in global banking. We report on a detailed study of a multinational bank operating in the emergent economy of India with a random national sample of over 9,000 of their customers. Our research provides valuable insights into a market driven bank's drive for customer satisfaction and referrals and examines antecedents and consequences of such initiatives. We provide empirical evidence suggesting that responsiveness to customer enquiries and complaints might be a strong driver of customer satisfaction, irrespective of the outcome of the resolution process. Our finding that responsiveness supersedes a positive outcome in service provider-customer conflict resolution is a contribution of this research to extant literature with important strategic and managerial implications for firms. © 2012 The Clute Institute.