Assessing the Quality of Bank Services by Using the Gap Analysis Model

In recent years, banks have had to present more various services with higher quality due to th e increase in competition and keeping the durability and their profitability. Indeed in these years the increasing trend of competitive environment in the banking industry of the country attracted banks to the field of offering banking services expected by the customers more than before. In this issue paying attention to the effective factors on customers' expectations and its relationship with services quality is one of the important issues of the evaluation of services quality. This research tries to investigate customers' understandings and five dimensions of services quality and its relationship with customers' understanding of services quality besides paying attention to this issue, since based on the researches performed by Parasuraman et al, services quality is derived from the difference between customers' understandings and expectations which is shown by gap No. 5 in gap analysis model. Therefore customers' understandings and expectations must be measured in order to investigate services quality. For this purpose, the recent research was performed based on gap analysis model with the purpose of investigating the quality of banking services on the level of Eghtesad-e-Novin Bank. It was concluded after determining the desirable services from the standpoints of the customers (investigating customers' expectations) and its effective factors and also the examination of the current status of service s quality (customers' understandings) that Eghtesad-e-Novin Bnak responses to customers' expectations in all of the branches under investigation and the understood services quality has been always more than services quality expected by the customers. The method used in this research is cohesion or cooperation method for which a questionnaire was prepared and distributed among the customers. The sample under investigation consisted of 200 customers of Eghtesad-e-Novin Bank in Mashhad. Finally this paper analyzes the information obtained in order to conclude and present suggestions.