eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Objectives of study: The objective of this thesis is to develop a multiple item scale for measuring service quality of online banking in Bozhou City, Anhui Province, China. Briefly speaking, the first theoretical objective of this study is to discuss concept e-service quality as well as related e-service quality models, especially E-S-QUAL/E-RecS-QUAL (Parasuraman et al. 2005).The second objective is to define and establish one suitable multiple e-service item scale for China with the help of E-S-QUAL/E-RecS-QUAL model and other related models. The objective of empirical part is to get the refined measurement scale for online banking service through data collection and analysis in Bozhou City, Anhui Province, China.

Academic background and methodology: Service quality plays an important role as competitive weapon and a significant differentiator for many service organizations (Parasuraman & Zeithaml, 1988), involving e-banking industry. According to Wang et. al (2003), good e-service quality offering is the key issue to survive in the intensively competitive banking market, especially maintain customer satisfaction. As a result of this phenomenon, a good understanding of service attributes that customers use to evaluate online banking service quality is needed for banks so that the performance of e-service is able to be monitored and immediate adjustments and improve can be done as soon as possible.

In this study, an overview of service quality (including e-service quality) and related literature is discussed, especially in the context of online banking industry that is taken as the case subject. Moreover, the study adopts E-S-QUAL/E-RecS-QUAL scale (Parasuraman et al. 2005) to estabilish a suitable multiple e-service item scale for measuring online banking in China. The target group for this study is limited to young and middle aged people between 19-39, e.g. university students etc. Survey sending and gathering is chosen as data collection for this thesis.

Findings and conclusions: Through the process of data collection and factor analysis in the empirical part, the refined scale for measuring online banking in China was identified, involving 3 dimensions and 14 items: customer service, privacy and preferential and reliable treatment. This finding indicated that the dimensions and items from E-S-QUAL/E-RecS-QUAL needed to be reorganized and reinterpreted for measuring online banking in Bozhou City of China.