THE ROLE OF SERVICE QUALITY DIMENSIONS IN SHAPING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR Charu Upadhyaya Asst. Professor, Lala Lajpatrai Institute of Management, Lala Lajpatrai Marg, Mahalaxmi, Mumbai, India. Email: charu.upadhyaya@gmail.com V.K Jain Ph.D. Director, COER School of Management, Roorkee, India, Email: drvkjain72@gmail.com ABSTRACT Service quality plays a major role in customer satisfaction and creating brand loyalty in financial sector. The rapid growth and competitive competition in service sectors, in developing countries, has made it significantly important for the organizations to measure and evaluate their service quality this paper examines the service quality in the Banking and Insurance Sectors and identifies dimensions which contribute to customer satisfaction. Thus, this study aimed at finding out if banks and insurance companies in India have employed the same variables to achieve customer satisfaction, furthermore the study measures and compares perception of customers on the customer service practices amongst the two sectors. In order to access the service levels of the two sectors primary data was collected by using self-designed questionnaire. There various factors of Service Quality such as Empathy, Responsiveness, Tangibles and Assurance were selected and respondents score was measured for these factors. For Insurance Sector all factors, Empathy, Tangibles, Assurance and Responsiveness emerged as most significant constructs and create a significant difference with Banking Sector. As the difference lies in these factors, they tend to affect the Customer Satisfaction, thus with the increase in Service Quality levels Customer Satisfaction can be increased for the two sectors. Keywords: CRM, Customer Service, Empathy, Responsiveness, Tangibles, Assurance 1. INTRODUCTION Customers today are becoming increasingly sophisticated and demanding. They expect organizations to be highly responsive and increasingly dependable and to provide more facilities for their convenience. Organizations have also realized the need to get closer to the customers to be able to increase their market share and beat 65