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The purpose of this paper is to determine the critical factors to accessing the level of service quality of banks by re‐examining the SERVQUAL model, originally pioneered by Parasuraman. Further, the technique of dominance analysis is used to measure the relative importance of each critical factor in closing up overall service quality gap of banks.

The sample consists of 308 bank customers from different parts of Malaysia. The data were collected by using a structured questionnaire, which consists of three parts. Part 1 deals with consumers' usage of banking channels and their banking behavior. Part 2 contains 26 statements related to service quality dimensions based on past literatures. Finally, Part 3 contains the questions related to the socio‐demographic profiles of respondents.

The modified SERVQUAL model consists of four critical factors (dimensions) as detected by factor analysis. They are: tangibility, reliability, competence and convenience. The results reveal that there are significant differences between the respondents' expectation and their perceptions. Among the four dimensions tested, tangibility has the smallest gap whereas convenience has the largest gap. The application of dominance analysis indicates that competence and convenience together can help to reduce the SERVQUAL gap as much as 76 per cent. The banking sector needs to become more competent by being more responsive and fulfilling the assurance of the customers and providing the banking facilities more conveniently.

The paper shows that hardly any work has been conducted which applies the dominance analysis approach in SERVQUAL dimensions to determine the relative importance of the critical factors in closing the overall service quality gap. Measuring the relative importance of service quality dimensions consistently will provide insights to the banks as to what areas need to be emphasized in order to retain their customers and attract new ones. It provides the guidelines for the banks to develop proper strategies and react faster to the changes of customers' banking behavior.

This study aims to find the differences in the service quality (if any) between two types of banks, namely conventional and Islamic, in terms of common critical factors after re‐examining the SERVQUAL model, originally pioneered by Parasuraman. Further, the technique of dominance analysis is used to examine the relative importance of the critical factors in closing up the overall service quality gap in these two types of banks.

The sample is made up of 308 bank customers, consisting of the customers from both Islamic and conventional banks from different parts of Malaysia. The data have been collected by using the structured questionnaire, which consists of three parts. Part 1 deals with consumers' usage of banking channels and their banking behaviour. Part 2 contains 26 statements related to service quality dimensions based on past literature. Finally, Part 3 contains the questions related to the socio‐demographic profiles of respondents.

The modified SERVQUAL model consists of four critical factors (dimensions) as detected by factor analysis: tangibility, reliability, competence, and convenience. The results reveal that the expectations on competence and convenience are significantly different between conventional banks and Islamic banks, whereas the perceptions on tangibility and convenience are found to be significantly different between these two types of banks. The application of dominance analysis in the SERVQUAL model indicates that the difference between the two types of banks is in terms of degree and not pattern. Competence and convenience are found to be the relatively more dominating factors in both the types of banks. These two dimensions together can help to reduce the overall service quality gap to an extent of 72 per cent in the case of conventional banks and 85 per cent in the case of Islamic banks.

The application of dominance analysis in the SERVQUAL model could be more meaningful in determining the relative importance of the factors when dimensions are interdependent. It permits direct comparison of measures and allows one to predict the level of influence of one factor in comparison with other factors. The study could be quite useful from the policy perspective in providing the guidelines to develop proper strategies and acknowledge the changes in customers' banking behaviour more quickly.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the microeconomics concept of elasticity to estimate the SERVQUAL gap elasticity to derive important insights for service providers to develop the right strategies to bridge the overall gap in service.

The dimensions of SERVQUAL adopted from Parasuraman et al. (1988) and Kumar et al. (2009) are first verified for their unidimensionality using structural equation modeling and reliability in the context of United Arab Emirates banking industry. Furthermore, the technique of dominance analysis is used to derive the relative importance of dimensions for different groups of banks. Finally, the stepwise log-linear regression models are used to estimate the gap elasticity to measure the responsiveness of the overall SERVQUAL gap to a change in customers’ perception on different dimension.

The results reveal that the dimension which is prioritized as the most important dimension need not to be the one to be targeted under the resource constraint to react faster to the changes of customers’ banking behavior.

This is probably the first attempt to examine the service quality through gap elasticity. This method is especially useful when the traditional approach to measure relative importance of critical factors fails to clearly discriminate between two or more dimensions, which, in turn, may lead to failure in decision making to choose the right strategies to bridge the overall gap in the service.

Based upon an extended SERVQUAL model, this paper attempts to measure and compare the service quality between conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia.

A new dimension, i.e. convenience was added to the existing SERVQUAL model of five dimensions. Data were collected from 287 bank customers residing in two major cities in Malaysia using self‐reporting questionnaires. Factor analysis is used to validate the instrument, after which the gap and dominance analyses techniques are employed.

The factor analysis extracted four dimensions of service quality, i.e. tangibility, reliability, competence, and convenience. The results reveal that there are large and significant differences between respondents' expectations and their perceptions. Specifically, the expectations on competence and convenience are significantly different between the conventional and Islamic banks, whereas the perceptions on tangibility and convenience are found to be significantly different between the two types of banks. The application of dominance analysis to predict the SERVQUAL gap indicates that the difference between the two types of banks lie in terms of degree but not pattern. Competence and convenience are found to be the relatively more dominant dimensions in both types of banks. These two dimensions, taken together, can help to reduce the overall service quality gap to an extent of 72 percent in the case of conventional banks and 85 percent in the case of Islamic banks.

Although the outcomes lend support to the extended SERVQUAL model, the results are derived based on a relatively small sample size with an uneven distribution between the two types of banks. This limits the generalizability of the study results which calls for future research attention.

The Malaysian banking sector needs to take initiative to become more competent by being more responsive through fulfilling their assurance for customers and by providing banking facilities more conveniently.

This study is one of the first to examine and compare the service quality between conventional and Islamic banks using an extended SERVQUAL model. The results could be particularly useful to countries adopting dual banking systems.

There is considerable research examining the consequences and contingency factors of customer participation in the service encounter. In comparison, there is disproportionately less research examining the antecedents of customer participation. This paper aims to propose and test an appraisal-emotive framework of the effects of front-line employees’ in-role and extra-role behaviours on customer participation.

A survey on 583 customers of retail banks in China has been conducted to test the framework. Structural equation modelling and dominance analysis have been used for hypotheses testing.

Employees’ extra-role behaviour (i.e. organisational citizenship behaviour or OCB) has a stronger effect than their in-role behaviour (i.e. role-prescribed behaviour) in inducing customer participation. These effects are mediated by customer emotions. Specifically, the effect of employees’ in-role behaviour on customer participation was mediated by customers’ positive and negative emotions, whereas the effect of employees’ OCB was mediated by customers’ positive emotions but not by their negative emotions.

The findings reveal that strategic management of employee behaviours can influence customer participation. While organisations often provide training to enhance employees’ in-role behaviour to deliver service performance, they should also recognise and encourage employees’ OCB as a means of increasing customer participation. In particular, employees who display positive emotions tend to evoke positive emotions in customers, which increase customer participation in the service encounter.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies in marketing to examine the differential effects of employees’ in-role and extra-role behaviours on customer participation. Importantly, the findings show that employees’ OCB is not only more effective than employees’ in-role behaviour in influencing customer participation but also these two behaviours have varying effects on customer emotions. These findings are new and contribute to the literatures on customer participation, value co-creation and human resource management.

Service quality is an evaluation of how well a delivered service meets customers’ expectations. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reliable scale of measurement for service quality in banks.

The SERVQUAL model was adopted based on a Banking Service Quality (BSQ) model and a two-phase multiobjective optimization model was designed. A structured questionnaire with five-point Likert scale was administered with a 93 percent response rate of 270 sample size. A total of 22 variables were considered based on the BSQ model and the significance of these variables to customers’ satisfaction were investigated. Factor analysis was used to extract the most influential factors on the measure of service quality and four factors were selected namely: they deliver when promised, precision on account statements, queues that move rapidly and sufficient number of ATMs per branch. In order to determine the reliability of the multiple Likert questions in the survey, Cronbach’s α was used indicating a scale reliability of 0.743. Moreover, multiple regression analysis was carried out on the selected factors to design an objective function for the design and evaluation of service quality model. The model design used for benchmarking was done using multiobjective genetic algorithm in MATLAB. Similarly, the model evaluation was done in a java interface using multiobjective particle swamp optimization.

The evaluation results validated the designed model and showed that the factors they deliver when promised and queues that move rapidly are a more reliable scale of measurement for customer’s satisfaction than the factors precision on account statements and sufficient number of ATMs per branch.

The implication of the results is that effectiveness and assurance combined with access is a more significant factor for measuring customers’ satisfaction than tangibles based on the BSQ model.

The introduction of a two-phase optimization model for model benchmarking and evaluation as compared to ordinary factor analysis of the dimension constructs.

This study aims to examine the mediating role of audit seasonality on the association between audit fees and audit quality in Nigerian deposit money banks.

The sample comprises 14 banks with annual financial statements between 2008 and 2020. The modified Baron and Kenny’s (1986) causal mediation model by Iacobucci et al. (2007) through the use of bootstrapped partial least square structural equation modelling and Sobel’s (1986) z-test is adopted to achieve this study’s objective.

The results of the causal mediation analysis show evidence of a fully mediating role of audit seasonality in the association between audit fees and audit quality in the Nigerian banking industry.

This study extends the body of knowledge by demonstrating how audit fees influence audit quality through audit seasonality as a mediator in line with the job demands-and resources and conservation of resources theories. Regulatory authorities should be wary of policies that will further increase the workload of already burdened personnel of audit firms as the uniform fiscal year-end of 31 December introduced in the Nigerian banking system has unintended consequences on audit fees and audit quality.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first studies to provide evidence on the indirect association between audit fees and audit quality.

The purpose of this research paper is to define the factors that a bank would require to have in order to succeed in the traditionally unbanked segment of the East African region. The paper specifically looks at approaches used by banks to make banking affordable and accessible to most Kenyans. Most banks are turning their focus to the traditionally unbanked with all of them competing in an ever decreasing market.

The research was carried out by using both primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected using a survey questionnaire administered to customers of banks in Kenya whilst secondary data were collected from the banking survey of Kenya reports. Respondents were sampled using convenient sampling method.

The paper found empathy and satisfaction to be the major critical success factors (CSFs) for these banks. This implies that customers who visit these banks are more concerned with the attention they receive when they seek financial services. It was also found that there was significant difference between banks that cater for the traditionally unbanked customers (TUC) and those that do not.

Management of banks should put into cognizance aspects of empathy and satisfaction which are the identified CSFs. This will enable them to improve and sustain their competitiveness in the banking sector.

The paper puts forward market practices which can inform policies and guide other financial institutions that would want to provide services to the TUC.

The paper introduces the concept of service quality for TUC who were left out in the banking sector in Kenya.

This study aims to focus on sustainable supplier selection in a construction company considering a new multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method based on dominance-based rough set analysis. The inclusion of sustainability concept in industrial supply chains has started gaining momentum due to increased environmental protection awareness and social obligations. The selection of sustainable suppliers marks the first step toward accomplishing this objective. The problem of selecting the right suppliers fulfilling the sustainable requirements is a major MCDM problem since various conflicting factors are underplay in the selection process. The decision-makers are often confronted with inconsistent situations forcing them to make imprecise and vague decisions.

This paper presents a new method based on dominance-based rough sets for the selection of right suppliers based on sustainable performance criteria relying on the triple bottom line approach. The method applied has its distinct advantages by providing more transparency in dealing with the preference information provided by the decision-makers and is thus found to be more intuitive and appealing as a performance measurement tool.

The technique is easy to apply using “jrank” software package and devises results in the form of decision rules and ranking that further assist the decision-makers in making an informed decision that increases credibility in the decision-making process.

The novelty of this study of its kind is that uses the dominance-based rough set approach for a sustainable supplier selection process.

Dominance techniques are used to analyze and rank inequality, welfare, and poverty across regions in Thailand in the 1990s. Inference-based dominance methods are applied to consumption expenditure microdata from the Household Socio-Economic Surveys (SES) of 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000. Attention is focused on the period immediately before and after the economic contraction of 1996–1997. Lorenz dominance is employed to assess inequality, while first-order Engel food share dominance is applied to rank welfare across time and among regions. Poverty is evaluated by comparing truncated food-share quantile functions. The evidence reveals that the economic crisis in 1997 seems to affect inequality in Bangkok (the richest region) more than the Northeast (the poorest region), and most dramatic changes occur in the North and South. Welfare in Bangkok is unambiguously higher than in other regions before and after economic contraction. In fact, the great economic contraction changes the rankings of economic well-being and poverty only in the North, South, and Northeast.