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1. Introduction
Advancement in information technology and the widespread use of the internet have changed service delivery methods in the last few decades. The brick and mortar system has been replaced by a click and portal system to provide customized services to consumers (Shaikh and Karjaluoto, 2015) and banks are not an exception. Banks are now providing their services through an electronic-banking (e-banking) channel. Personal computers are the medium by which customers can use e-banking services, with the terms “Online banking,” “internet banking,” “electronic banking” and “e-banking” used interchangeably in the literature (Amin, 2016; Ayo et al., 2016; Yap et al., 2010). E-banking means the process through which a customer digitally interacts with a bank via computers without the need of a human contact (Jayawardhena, 2004). At the initial stage, e-banking was used to provide information about banking services. However, today’s customers are using online banking both as a transactional as well as an informational medium, and experiencing the wide range of banking services it has to offer including account inquiry, bank statement download, cheque book order, bill payment, fund transfer, fixed deposit management, stock investment and insurance term payment (Tan and Teo, 2000). E-banking enables consumers to conveniently enjoy an array of customized banking services and assists banks in order to offer their services to a large number of consumers in a cost-efficient manner (Narayanasamy et al., 2011; Yoon and Steege, 2013; Amin, 2016).
Due to the increasing rate of adoption of e-banking systems, banks face stiff competition in attracting and retaining customers with their e-banking platforms. In this context, providing high-quality e-banking service is considered a basic strategy for gaining competitive advantage in this service delivery platform (Jayawardhena, 2004; Butt and Aftab, 2013; Kandampully et al., 2015; Makanyeza and Chikazhe, 2017). Essentially, enhancing the service quality of e-banking is viewed as the best strategic tool to make customers loyal to the e-banking system (Brun et al., 2014).
Consumer-perceived service quality evaluations could vary from context to context (Parasuraman et al., 2005), and accordingly customer perceptions and expectations of service quality can differ between physical banking and e-banking (Lin et al., 2014; Arcand et al., 2017). Hence, researchers have developed the e-banking service quality (EBSQ) scale...