A RELATIONAL STUDY ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, CUSTOMER COMMITMENT, TRUST, AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY IN THE CONTEXT OF DHAKA BANK LIMITED

Abstract

Satisfaction is an ‘’overall customer attitude towards a service provider’’ (Levesque and McDougall, 1996, p. 14), or an emotional reaction to the difference between what customers anticipate and what they receive (Zineldin, 2000), regarding the fulfillment of some need, goal or desire(Oliver, 1999).A similar definition is provided by Gerpott, T.J.,Rams, W. and Schindler, A. (2001) who proposed that satisfaction is based on a customer’s estimated experience of the extent to which a provider’s services fulfils his or her expectations. During the last four decades, satisfaction has been considered as one of the most important theoretical as well as practical issues for most marketers and customer researchers (Jamal, 2004). Most researchers and practitioners accept the notion that customer satisfaction is positively associated with desirable business outcomes. Research has found that customer satisfaction has a measurable impact on purchase intentions (Bolton and Drew, 1991; Mittal et al., 1999; Oliver and DeSarbo, 1988), on customer retention (Anderson and Sullivan, 1993; Bolton, 1998; Ittner and Larcker, 1998; Mittal and Kamakura, 2001), and on firms’ financial performance (Anderson and Mittal, 2000; Fornell et al., 1996; Rust and Zahorik, 1993). Recently, researchers have argued that there is a distinction between customer satisfaction as related to tangible products and as related to service experiences. The marketing literature emphasizes price as an important factor of consumer satisfaction, because whenever consumers evaluate the value of an acquired product or service, they usually think of the price (Zeithaml, 1988; Fornell, 1992; Anderson and Sullivan, 1993; Anderson, E.W., Fornell, C. and Lehmann, D.R. 1994; Cronin, J. Jr, Brady, M.K. and Hult, G.T.M. 2000). As for the relationship of price to satisfaction, Zeithaml and Bitner (1996) indicated that the extent of satisfaction was subject to the factors of service quality, product quality, price, situation, and personal factors. However, price has not been fully investigated in previous empirical studies 4 A RELATIONAL STUDY ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, CUSTOMER COMMITMENT, TRUST, AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY IN THE CONTEXT OF DHAKA BANK LIMITED (Bei and Chiao, 2001).Service quality, service features and customer-complaint handling determined customer satisfactions in banks. Anderson et al. (1994) consider that satisfaction requires previous consumption experience and depends on price, whereas quality can be perceived without previous consumption experience and does not normally depend on price, although in circumstances where there is little available information or where quality evaluation is difficult, price can be an indicator of quality. Mano and Oliver (1993) establish that satisfaction is an attitude or evaluative judgment varying along the hedonic continuum focused on the product, which is evaluated after consumption.