Service Delivery Design Practices and Customer Satisfaction Among Commercial Banks in Kenya

Abstract

Consumers all over the world have become more quality conscious hence there has been an increased customer demand for higher quality service. The purpose of service design is to have processes that consistently deliver high quality services to drive customer satisfaction and customer retention, whilst maintaining process efficiency. Commercial Banks in Kenya have continuously invested in service delivery design practices to ensure highly satisfied customers. This paper sought to determine service delivery design practices in the Commercial Banking Sector and to establish the relationship that exists between service delivery design practices and customer satisfaction in the commercial banking sector. The design practices identified includes; service delivery design to customer needs, service delivery design to service concept, service delivery design to service encounters, service delivery design for service delivery systems and service delivery design for direct manipulation of satisfaction. Primary data was collected using a semi structured questionnaire, designed to be completed by respondents who are the 43 commercial banks in Kenya. The data was then checked for Completeness and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The research has revealed that indeed majority of commercial banks in Kenya have invested in service delivery design practices in effort to enhance customer satisfaction. The results revealed that the design to service delivery practices raised the lowest level of expectation, whereas the design to service encounter practices dimension fulfilled the highest level of perception. The results showed that the overall mean score of perception was higher than expectation in all dimensions. Hence, customers were satisfied with all dimensions of service delivery design practices. Further study should be undertaken to apply the results of this study. It would be valuable to conduct further research concerning the perception by the bank branches of the different banks and comparison of the outcome with other service industries. Further research in these areas would further contribute to overall improvement of service standards of Commercial Banks in Kenya. The paper concludes by a confirmation that service delivery design practices have an influence on the levels of customer satisfaction in commercial banks in Kenya.