~ 302 ~  ISSN Print: 2394-7500 ISSN Online: 2394-5869 Impact Factor: 5.2 IJAR 2016; 2(1): 302-306 www.allresearchjournal.com Received: 21-11-2015 Accepted: 24-12-2015 Pratap Chandra Mandal VIT Business School, VIT University, India Correspondence Pratap Chandra Mandal VIT Business School, VIT University, India Dimensions affecting customer satisfaction in retail banking: A literature review Pratap Chandra Mandal Abstract Customer satisfaction is important for all organizations because it determines their existence in the competition. Services sector form an important aspect of today’s business scenario. Customer satisfaction is especially important for services sector. Banking constitutes an important aspect in the services sector. Banks will not be able to serve their customer unless they know what their customers really want and what satisfy them. Banks will be able to know about these requirements from the various dimensions of customer satisfaction in the retail banking. For this reason, it becomes important to understand the dimensions affecting customer satisfaction in retail banking. This paper reviews the literature with respect to finding the dimensions affecting customer satisfaction in retail banking and comes out with some suggestions which need to be followed in finding the dimensions. Keywords: retail banking, customer satisfaction, literature review, qualitative research, dimensions 1. Introduction Customer satisfaction is considered to be important for success in today’s highly competitive banking industry. Prabhakaran and Satya (2003) [34] have mentioned that the customer is the most important person in any form of business. Profit and growth are outcomes of customer loyalty (Heskett et al., 1997) [17] . The cost of serving a loyal customer is five or six times less than that for a new customer (Gee et al., 2008; Ndubisi, 2005; Pfeifer, 2005) [13, 29, 32] . Several researchers including Tariq and Moussaoui (2009) [43] , Han et al. (2008) [15] and Ehigie (2006) [8] found that loyalty is a direct outcome of customer satisfaction. Generally speaking, if the customers are satisfied with the provided goods or services, the probability that they will use the services again increases (East, 1997) [7] . Also, satisfied customers will most probably talk enthusiastically about their buying or the use of a particular service. This will lead to positive word of mouth (File and Prince, 1992; Richens, 1983) [10, 35] . On the other hand, dissatisfied customers will most probably switch to a different brand. This will lead to negative word of mouth (Nasserzadeh et al., 2008) [28] . The significance of satisfying and keeping a customer in establishing strategies for a market and customer-oriented organization cannot be ignored (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990) [21] . Banks are losing 8 percent of their clients every year globally (Storbacka, 2000) [41] . So, it is extremely important to address the issue of customer satisfaction in retail banking, its dimensions and its measurement. This would help retail banks in improving specific service parameters in order to increase overall customer satisfaction. This would also help banks to develop strategies and action plans to retain their present customers and to attract new customers for their banks. Banks need to know the present customer satisfaction levels to achieve this. For this banks require to measure customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction cannot be measured unless the dimensions affecting customer satisfaction are determined. 1.1. Concept of Customer Satisfaction Customer satisfaction is one of the important issues for the marketing function of an organization (Mick and Fournier, 1999; Spreng et al., 1996; Surprenant and Churchill, 1982; Oliver, 1980) [24, 40, 42, 31] . It links the processes resulting in purchase and consumption with post- purchase phenomena such as attitude change, repeat purchase, and brand loyalty (Surprenant and Churchill, 1982) [42] . This opinion has also been supported by Mishra International Journal of Applied Research 2016; 2(1): 302-306