Abstract The study conirms direct and positive inluence of several organisational service orientation-practices like Service Leadership Practices, Human Resources Management Practices, Service Encounter Practices and Service Systems Practices on customer service quality perception in a retail banking setting, where service quality perception is considered to be one of the most critical factors for performance. Using path analysis, a sample size of 190 frontline employees and 567 customers of four prestigious banks operating in northern most part of India was considered for analyzing and matching their perceptions to examine the causal relationships. The study also reports existence of indirect relationship between organisational service orientation-practices and customer service quality perception mediated through several intermediating variables. These intermediating variables are employee job attitudes like employee service effort, job satisfaction, and commitment. The intermediating variables apart from direct effect on customer evaluation are revealed to have measurable positive role in mediating the causal relationship between organisational service orientation practices and the customer evaluation. Keyword: Organisational Service Orientation, Employee Responses, Service Quality Perception, Customer Responses Organisational Service Orientation Inluencing Contact Employee and Customer Responses Mushtaq Ahmed Siddiqi* Introduction Customers rely considerably on the attitude of contact employees working on the frontline, in forming their overall rating of the irm’s service delivery. This is mainly due to the fact that to most customers, the employees they encounter are the irm (Berry 1995). In service organisations, there is no chance for trial as quality occurs during service encounter between contact employee and the customer. If a contact employee responds unpleasantly, it forms part of quality and consequently affects customer’s evaluation. Consequently, the interaction which is supposed to create core value in service delivery will become means of dissatisfaction for customer. Therefore, contact employee’s behaviour needs to be managed which is both crucial and challenging. Organisation has to provide a setting which supports and enables contact employee’s behaviour in a way desired by customer and improve the overall service delivery. There are number of ways to ensure that the contact employees behave in a way, desired by customers, possesses a sunny disposition, willingness and above all ability to serve their customers better. Among the ways, the focus of the present study is Organisational Service Orientation (OSO henceforth in this article).The concept, though fairly new to the services marketing literature, yet has been widely acknowledged by service marketing scholars and business professionals in developed countries. Organisational Service Orientation (OSO) Service marketing scholars have long acknowledged the signiicance of developing service orientation. An OSO exists when the organisational climate for service crafts, nurtures, and rewards service practices and behaviours known to meet customer needs. There are two possible levels of establishing the service orientation concept: either at individual level or at organisational level (Homburg et al., 2002). Service orientation from an individual level is referred to employee attitudes and behaviours affecting the quality of * Associate Professor, The Business School, University of Kashmir, J&K,, India. E-mail: mailmushtaq@kashmiruniversity.ac.in Article can be accessed online at http://www.publishingindia.com