An Empirical Investigation of Key Antecedents of Customer Preference of Internet Banking in Indian Context

Abstract

With the advent of e-banking and globalization, the banking sector in India is getting fierce day-by-day, making it difficult for the banking organization to manage the competition effectively. The key lies in gaining competitive advantage in today's era of competition, paying attention to more critical service quality attributes as a part of customer service management with respect to the internet banking. Though many studies have been undertaken to address the issue of identification of determinants of internet banking service quality, but research on the examination of key attributes of internet banking service quality fostering customers' preference towards internet banking offerings of a particular bank seems to be virtually unexplored. Against this backdrop, the present study aims at exploring key antecedents of e-service quality that can lead customer preference towards internet banking offerings of a particular bank. To achieve this objective, the study conducts discriminant analysis to screen the perception of customers towards public sector bank's and private sector bank' internet banking service quality and to find out which variables are relatively better in predicting customers' preference towards internet banking offerings of a particular bank. This research has implications for bank marketers as well as for researchers interested in online marketing.