Exploring the determinants of relationship quality in retail banking services

Abstract

The rapid change in the financial market has led to a shift to relationship marketing, which emphasizes relationships with existing customers rather than creating new ones. Therefore, to achieve competitive advantage in the market, assessing service quality and relationship quality has become an important tool for financial institutions. The widely applied five dimension model has shown problems of dimensions overlapping and blurring with each other, which results in the lack in providing the marketer with practical administrative implications. Therefore, a three dimensional model, composed of interaction quality, physical environment quality and outcome quality, that could be applied in general to various service industries and, at the same time, categorized into service quality dimensions that are not ambiguous for marketers to manage has been utilized. As a result, in the case of Korean consumers, interaction quality, physical environment quality, and outcome quality were shown to have positive effects on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. For Brazilian consumers, physical environment quality and outcome quality were shown to have positive effects on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Also, a median effect of customer satisfaction was found. This paper reviews the concept and dimensions of service quality and relationship quality, as well as verifying the structural relationship between the two variables through empirical analysis. Through the results of the analysis, the paper compares the differences between two distinctive countries and present theoretical and academic implications.