Measuring Audacity of Service Quality of Vying Banks for Fostering Elan and Aplomb Customer Relationship Marketing

Building relationships with customers had become a modern business necessity as it fosters immense benefits to businesses in terms of retaining customers, imparting maximum customer satisfaction, capturing more market share etc. Besides this imparting robust service quality adds to building strong customer relations thereby leading to develop relationship marketing. The present study is descriptive in nature which investigates the role of service quality imparted by banks to the SMEs as customers. First-hand data was gathered from 183 branch managers of Jammu & Kashmir Bank (62 branches) through structured questionnaire. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were implied for data reduction. Service quality is encompassed with four factors viz., Tangibility, Empathy, Timely services and Personalised attention. The CFA model has a good fit as all regression weights are above 0.50. The result indicates that good service quality leads to effective relationship marketing. Hence, the present study unearths the impact of service quality of banks (service provider) in developing strong customer relations with SMEs. The study is presumed to be useful for researchers, practitioners, marketers and policy makers. The study is confined to the Jammu and Kashmir Bank (JKB) branches and their SMEs operating in two industrial areas.