In The Financial Service Profit Chain, Customer Satisfaction Research

As China's Entry into the World Trade Organization is coming, it is foreseen that the financial industry hi China will join hi a fair and intense contest of the international financial market. In order to reduce the distance between domestic financial institutions and overseas competitors, and adjust our financial institutions to competitions of global markets as soon as possible, it is urgent to change thoroughly our out-of-date conceptions on the financial business and management, and enhance rapidly the managerial competence.As the same as general services, financial services have some characteristics differing from goods. Consequently, the traditional management patterns and methods based on the industry for manufacture couldn't be quite effective in the financial practice. A burning issue of the moment is to utilize theories and methods for the service management to guide the future practice. However, in China, there is hardly any systematically theoretical research about the service management, or any financial practice applying modern theories in the Occident of the service management.For filling this vacancy in theoretical study field, I choose, A Research on the Customer Satisfaction (CS) in the Financial Service-Profit Chain (FSPC), as my thesis topic. The thesis attempts to apply the general ideas of the Sendee-Profit Chain (James L. Heskett, W.Earl Sasser, & Leonard A.Schlesinger, 1994, 1997) to build the FSPC. As the key factor in the FSPC, the CS attracts my attention. I am going to make theoretical and empirical studies on the CS using the qualitative and quantitative methods. The thesis contains three parts:1. At first, I study historically what reasons caused early researches focused on the service management, and how these theories recently have been developing generally. Then, the FSPC is built on the base of the SPC. It will be proved that the CS equals to the service quality and plays a vital role in the FSPC. while analyzing the whole construction of the FSPC. A further study referring to functions of the CS is necessary for us to understand the CS perfectly.2. Using SERVQUAL standard scales as a major part of the questionnaire, a survey focusing on customer expectations, customer perceptions and other relative factors is conducted on retailing bank consumers in Zhejiang Province. A Gap Analysis, an Exploratory Factor Analysis, Correlation Matrix and Cross-tabs are put into practice, which could contribute toexplaining, objectively and quantitatively, the present situation of the CS in China, especially in Zhejiang Province, and also demonstrating the relationship between the CS and other factors, such as the customer loyalty, in the FSPC.3. In this part, a famous and authoritative model, the Service Quality Gap Model (Parasuraman, Zeithaml &Berry, 1988) which explains how to engender the CS, is my major reference. Regarding it, I would give my countermeasures and suggestion on upgrading the CS of domestic financial services, successively in the point of view of the management of customer expectations, the management of customer perceptions and the balance management: (1) to manage customer expectations by clarifying, communicating with and choosing customers; (2) to improve customer perceptions depending on establishing the "customer-focused" merchanism, reconstructing processes of frnanical services and enhancing the leverage factor of employees; (3) to balance customer expectations and perceptions by remedying services , according to the theory of "windows of customers" and "customer mentality".