Customer Satisfaction Index Model for Indian Banking Industry: A Qualitative Study

The conventional financial measures have always dominated the business performance evaluation in India. There is a need to augment the current approaches to evaluate the financial health of individual firms and industries. Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) is one of the best solutions which is a customer-based satisfaction benchmarking system and serves as a standard metric, widely implemented in the United States and Europe. However, there is no such index in India and there is a need for a non-financial, customer-based satisfaction metric. This study is a pilot attempt to develop a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) model, specifically for the Indian banking industry. To achieve this, the focus group technique was employed to find the key determinants of customer satisfaction in the banking industry. The comprehensive thematic analysis revealed a total of six themes and nine sub-themes which have been proposed as the antecedents of customer satisfaction in the CSI model for the Indian banking industry. The future research intends to develop instrumentation based on the focus group results and validate the hypothesized CSI model proposed in this study.