Customer Satisfaction in the Financial Industry: San Francisco versus Melbourne, Australia

Beginning of article

INTRODUCTION

One of the most important measures of success in marketing financial institutions is customer satisfaction. Although there has been extensive research into the bank marketing environment within a country (see Lisanin, 1998, Gardener, 1994, and Meyers and Mullins, 2000), there is little research measuring customer perception of banks internationally. That is, there are very few studies measuring the customer perception of one country's banking environment compared with another country's banking environment. One exception (Witkowski and Kellner, 1996) is somewhat disappointing because the differences discussed lack significance statistics. This paper measures consumer perceptions of banks in Melbourne, Australia and San Francisco California, and compares consumer perceptions in the two countries.

On every dimension, consumers in San Francisco are more satisfied with their banking environment than consumers in Melbourne. Further, we find that the most significant areas of difference are due to external factors. These factors may be related to bank regulation in the two countries and how banks are allowed to compete. We begin by discussing the methodology.

METHODOLOGY

One of the authors surveyed consumers in Melbourne, Australia and San Francisco, California to determine their perceived level of customer satisfaction with their banking institutions. The respondents were asked to indicate their level of satisfaction with their bank on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 is poor and 5 is excellent). The survey (see Exhibit 1) was organized to determine the split between the external features and the internal features of the banks. External features include location, …