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ABSTRACT The Effects of Self-Service Web Portals on Online Banking Service Quality: A Theoretical Model

In today’s world of intense competition, one of the keys to competitive advantage lies in delivering high quality services and enhancing customer satisfaction (Ismail, Madi & Francis, 2009; Shemwell, Yavas & Bilgin, 1998). Service quality has been identified as the ultimate goal of service providers (Sureshchandar, Rajendran & Anantharaman, 2002). Service quality and customer satisfaction are inarguably two core concepts at the crux of the marketing theory and practice (Spreng & Mackoy, 1996). Today, many financial services organizations are rushing to become more customer focused (Peppard, 2000).

Technological developments particularly in the area of telecommunications and information technology are revolutionizing the banking industry. Aided by technological advances and developments, banks have responded to the challenge of competition from several companies that have entered into financial and banking industry by adopting online banking strategy that focuses on attempting to build customer satisfaction (Al-Somali, Gholami & Clegg, 2009) through providing better products and services and at the same time to reduce operating costs (Sadiq Sohail & Shanmugam, 2003). The Internet has expanded horizons for businesses worldwide, especially e-services (Alsajjan & Dennis, 2010). Retailer’s websites are an important interface between retailers (banks) and their customers. The findings on various features and elements that banks include their websites play critical role in attracting customers and ensuring their satisfaction with online services (Song, Baker, Lee & Wetherbe, 2012). During the last few years, these findings have led to the development of simple banking web sites into comprehensive e-banking portals offering a great variety of services in addition to traditional bank products and thereby enabling customers to gain financial advice from merely one source (Bauer, Hammerschmidt & Falk, 2004).

One of the significant ways in which Internet technologies provide opportunities for enhancing customer service is through the adoption and implementation of self-service web portals. Web portals play an increasingly specialized role in the online world (Sharma & Gupta, 2005). Portals are gateways enabling viewers to access organisational services via Internet. Portals integrate a variety of services providing them to viewers in a single window (Al-Mudimigh, Ullah & Alsubaie, 2011). These portals provide support for the conduct of banking transactions through the Internet. Examples of the transactions are balance inquiry, transaction history, account transfer, online bill payments, and online loan applications (Kim & Prabhakar, 2004). Bank websites that offer only information on their pages without possibility to do any transactions online are not qualified as self-service portals (Pakkarainen, Pakkarainen, Karjaluoto & Pahnila, 2004). One advantage with portals banking is that no proprietary software has to be installed for accessing the banking service over the Internet. Banking services can be acquired through the public network of the Internet or through private virtual network. Hence, a customer can access to his/her bank account through the Internet Extranet (Liao, Shao, Wang & Chen, 1999).

The Internet is expected to have an important and positive effect on customer perceptions of service quality in the banking sector (Wang & Wang, 2006). Despite the importance of Internet banking in many financial institutions, fewer studies have focused on customer adoption and customer satisfaction (Musiime & Ramadhan, 2011) in Arab world and particularly in Saudi Arabia (Al-Ghatani, Hubona & Wang, 2007; Al-Somali, Gholami & Clegg 2009; AlSajjan & Dennis, 2010; Al-Mudimigh, Ullah & Alsubaie, 2011) especially using self-service portal based electronic banking services.

Given the salience of these portals, the goal of our research is to examine how the features of these portals could impact customer’s perceptions of the quality of banking services By proposing a new framework for portal implementation, our aim is to address the existing research gap by proposing a new framework for portal implementation. We draw upon theories and research from management information systems and services marketing to develop a set of propositions that answer the following question:

How do features of the web-based portals influence banking customers’ perceptions of service quality and satisfaction?

The next section of this paper presents our conceptual model. This model presents a nomological network of effects through which the features of the portal affect customer perceptions of online service quality and customer satisfaction. This model is built through an integration of related literature in information systems and services marketing. The subsequent section discusses the implications of this model and propositions for future research and practice.