AN OVERVIEW ON IMPORTANT MEASURING TECHNIQUES FOR SERVICE QUALITY IN BANKING’ (Pages 01-15) by Shravani Siripuram and T. Milton in THE INTERNATIONAL MANAGER / ISSN: 2348-9413 (Online); 2348-9405 (Print)

Service quality is recognized as the key strategic value to the organization. The major challenge to the banks is to increase the efficiency, lower costs, improve service quality and also increase satisfaction of customer. Service quality can be improved only if it is measured. The important measuring techniques for service quality are SERVQUAL scale and SERVPERF scale. The SERVQUAL scale is based on gap theory of Parasuraman et al. Service quality is the gap between customer’s expectations of service offering and customer’s perceptions of service received. Service quality can be measured based on five dimensions of service quality: Tangibility, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy. Each of these dimensions is measured by four to five items and after combining 21 items will be there and each item is measured in two ways: the expectations of customers concerning a service and the perceived levels of service actually provided. Cronin and Taylor carved out SERVPERF model from SERVQUAL. SERVPERF measures service quality by using only perceptions of customers. They stated that only perception was sufficient for measuring service quality and therefore expectations need not be considered. The SERVPERF scale is assumed to be superior and also more efficient in reducing number of items to be measured by 50%. Keywords: Customer’s Expectations, Customer’s Perceptions, Service Quality, SERVPERF, SERVQUAL etc.