| dc.description.abstract | The main purpose behind of this study is to find out the major factors that have impact in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in case of commercial banks of Nepal. The thesis tries to explore whether there exists any relationship between service quality dimensions, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty depending upon various situational factors. Various concepts such as consumer buying behavior, buyer’s decision process, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, service quality, SERVQUAL model have been discussed along with relevant relationship between them in the literature review and based upon it, a conceptual model had been formulated stating the five different hypotheses (one of the hypothesis has been divided into two sub-hypothesis).
In order to collect data for analysis, 375 completely filled questionnaires were collected within one month. The participants were asked to fill up the questionnaire form with face to face interaction. All these forms were collected from various commercial banks in Kathmandu, Nepal. In order to analyze the data, Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used and analytical techniques like factor analysis, multiple regression analysis, descriptive analysis were used along with Sobel test for mediation analysis.
After testing the hypotheses using various techniques, it was found that service quality dimensions such as tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, empathy and assurance had significant positive impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Similarly, one of the situational factors stated as years of relationship had significant positive relationship with customer satisfaction while another situational factor stated as frequency of visiting bank had a significant negative relationship with customer satisfaction. In the same way, in case of mediating factor, tangibility and frequency of visiting bank do not have significant relationship while reliability, responsiveness, years of relationship and empathy and assurance have significant positive relationship. However, it should be noted that some of the independent and mediating variable are overlapped. In case of control variable, only respondent age had positive significant impact on customer loyalty while other variable like education level, income and gender are not significantly related with customer loyalty.
This research is useful for commercial banks so that they can improve service quality to the customers and thus maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty. Similarly, the policy makers can make future plans in banking sector based upon the information provided by the customers while
iii
doing this research. In the same way, it can also contribute to other sectors by providing baseline information regarding service quality in Nepalese banking sector.
Key words: Customer satisfaction, Service quality dimensions, Customer loyalty, SERVQUAL, Linear regression, Situational factors, Factor analysis, Commercial banks, Buyer’s decision, Mediating factors, SOBEL test | nb_NO |
