Analysis of Mediating Effect of Customer Perception in Relation to Service Quality and Customer’s Satisfaction in Online Banking Services

Qualities of service act as significant in the competition, putting effect upon customer’s satisfaction. This research aims for assessing how service quality puts impact customers’ satisfaction in the online banking service. E-SERVQUAL with dimensions: efficiency, fulfillment, security, quick responses and easiness to use has been utilized to assess services’ qualities of service rendered by bank over internet. The pilot’s study was done with 33 responses and cronbach’s alpha was 0.882, which shows that the collected data is valid. A questionnaire comprising of 23 statements was made and 262 responses were analyzed by doing EFA through SPSSv21 and CFA & Structural Equation Modeling using SPPS AMOS 21.


Introduction
With the passage of time, usage of Internet by businesses has been increased in their marketing practices, because of which companies have increased their online communications with customers. (Farnaz Beheshti Zavareh et al., 2012). Gradually, banking & finance firms too have begun the delivery of services through online platform. Maximum quantity of banks customers is using online banking services these days. Development in both quantity & quality of IB/IM research in general is as same as the evolution of MIR in previous fifty years (Boddewyn, Jean J., Iyer, G. R.,1999). As the modern world's marketing is developing, companies delivering services like Banks are being compelled to look for ways for enhancing quality and performance while lowering prices or optimization of operations (Hazlina Abdul Kadir, Reza Masinaei, Nasim Rahmani, 2011). It is common knowledge that "green" values and policies are quite significant for businesses as public awareness of their environmental impacts has grown (Büyüközkan, G., Çifçi, G., 2012). In a developing economy like India, assessing variables influencing consumer understanding, believes, and satisfactions for banking over internet is an important part of overall strategy formulation process of a Bank ( Agarwal, R., Rastogi, S., Mehrotra, A., 2009).
Modern companies can relax their own capacities and manufacture in a more versatile manner to meet a variety of market demands thanks to supply chain management (Hung, S.-J., 2011). It is now more practical for a customer to process all the business transactions & other transactions through E-banking. Customers can easily pay their bills and can do online purchasing by taking help of the internet banking.
The study's main goal is to look at how services' qualities are related to levels of customers' satisfaction in online banking services. The level of satisfaction with services of a bank over internet is expressed as highly affected by qualities of services in previous studies. In addition, past studies showed a very strong effect of perceived quality of service (customer perception) of online banking services on satisfaction level of customer with regards to services of bank over internet. But no research has expressed service quality's influence on perceptions of customers for services of banks over the internet. On the basis of this, this research's purpose is to analyze service quality's influence on customer's perception towards quality of service of online services provided by bank.
Also no study has shown the customer's perception as a mediation variable in relation to service quality & customers' satisfaction with reference to online banking services. On its basis, this research's purpose is to analyze the mediation effect of customer's perception in relation to quality of services and levels of customers' satisfaction. The evaluation of quality of electronic banking service may be viewed as a multiple-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM) challenge (Hu, Y., Liao, P., 2011).

Literature Review:
Online Banking: Electronic commerce has a major impact on seller-buyer relationships. Banking has been among highly impacted industries (Methlie, L., Nysveen, H.,1999). Banking customers can now use many platforms to use tools that enable them to perform analyses, make decisions, and conduct financial transactions at home, workplace, or anywhere else (Hoehle, H., Scornavacca, E., Huff, S., 2012). Online Banking is a bank channel by using which customers can use financial and non-financial services on the bank's webpage. Online service of banks was firstly introduced in 1990 and now maximum clients are opting online banking services worldwide. With the advancement of offbeat and secured electronic exchange innovations, more banks are presently utilizing online keeping money both as a value based as well as an enlightening medium. (Alain Yee-Loong Chong et al., 2010). Online banking is now one of the most critical aspects of global electronic commerce. Providing successful electronic service quality (e-SQ) is critical for being and staying competitive in internet banking (Wu Yu-Lung; Chang, M.C.S.; Pei-Chi Yang; Ying-Jun Chen; 2008).
Banks use online services to make internet banking transactions easier and safer for their customers (Md Ariff, MSH., Yun, LO., Zakuan, N., Ismailb, KH., 2013). Online banking gives clients the ability to carry out banking operations at any time and location with low handling costs. (Muslim Amin, 2016). For a growing number of consumers, online services, such as online banking, are becoming an appealing alternative to visiting service outlets or calling call centres. Customers prefer online services (such as online banking services) for a variety of reasons, including ease, feeling more in charge of the service process, avoiding human interaction, and saving time (Kenova V. and Jonasson P.,2006).

Service Quality:
Qualities of services the most relevant requirements to stay competitive edge and client experience construction. Quality of service may be described as viewpoint of the customer on business entity's dominance in general. It is a shape that is attitude, and outcomes from a comparison of expectations on expectations of success obtained. Online service is a service provided by a website to a client or a prospective user. Online service quality can be described as the spread among services expected by a customer or a user of a given website and the one that webpage has already given.

Customer Perception:
Customer perception of online banking services is referred to the electronic theoretical area of consistency. It was designed in a particular way and tested extensively at merchant sites. This is the evaluation of performing standards and efficacy, which facilitates shopping over internet. Customers' Perception can be described as all the assessments and market decisions on the extent of greatness in the automated resources. (Chakib Hamadi, 2010). Managers of companies with web presences must first consider how customers view and assess online customer service in order to provide superior service quality. (Parasuraman, A. Zeithaml, V, Malhotra A,2005).
With the globalization of economies and developing information technology, the issue of supplier selection has become one of the most critical aspects of supply chain management (Dong, G., Yamaguchi, D., Nagai, M., 2006). As organisations compete more on sustainability of supplier chains' capabilities, growing supply has become important (Fu, X., Zhu, Q., Sarkis, J., 2012). Customer perception is the perceived service qualities which can be described as perceptions of usage and perceived ease of use. Perceived usage is an extent to which the person thinks that compared to conventional ways of banking, the online banking is more beneficial. These advantages include enabling them to conduct banking operations whenever and wherever they want. Perceived ease of use, like perceived usefulness, is derived from TAM. Although the customers may assume the application is beneficial, but they may also be helpful at the same time, considering it is difficult to utilize the scheme. Customers' perceived qualities of services were evaluated across six dimensions: easiness to utilize, which includes user friendliness, transaction speed, search capacity, and easy navigation; content on the Web site, especially information that fits the consumer's needs; accuracy of content; timeliness of response; aesthetics, and privacy.( Zeithaml, V., Parasuraman, A., and Malhorta, A.,2002). As a base to improve execution of services, we need to consider how customers judge efficiencies of services over internet. (Zeithaml,V, 2002). Service Quality and Customer Perception: There are several research initiatives aimed at identifying the determinants of consumer behavioural intentions, which include intention of a customer the service provider and spread favourable referrals with the environment, and they mostly concentrate upon cognition factors of customer conduct, viz; services' quality and price perception, with little ability to explain customers' post-buying behaviour (Giovanis, AN., Zondiros, D., Tomaras, P., 2014). Fast facilities in banking sector make it easy to use new technology to improve organizational capabilities and continuity of services to acquire and understand the clients. The use of online banking services offer banks the chance to exercise the passion of customers to believe to have a much awaited profit (Abdullah Bin Omar et al., 2011). The technology adoption model is a TRA adaptation in the area of informations. TAM claims that an individual's intention to use a system is determined by perceptions of utilities and perceptions of easiness of use, with intention to use acting as a mediator between actual system use and actual system use ( Hanafizadeh, P., Keating, BW., Khedmatgozar, HR., 2014). SPerceived ease of use is often thought to be directly affecting perceived usefulness. Service quality appears as the major variable causing effect online banking operations and it is directly affecting perceptions of customers. (Ahasanul Haque et al., 2009).
A large number of customers have a favorable view of bank's services delivered over internet and their level of satisfaction is higher with bank's services over internet (Dr. Uday Singh Rajput, 2015). H1: Qualities of services have a direct effect on Customer Perception of online banking services.

Customer's Satisfaction:
Customer's satisfaction can be described as fulfilling customer's need for goods and services. Customers are satisfied whether the perceived results meet or exceed the service standards of the customers. Customers are not satisfied, if the perceived results do not meet the service standards of the customers. (Muslim Amin, 2016).
A level of satisfaction of a customer is a reflection of the degree of which an enterprise is able to provide satisfaction as per customer's general standards and how well the enterprise is able to match up to an ideal picture.

Customer Perception and Customer Satisfaction:
Customer Perception can be evaluated through pre-purchase behavioral aspects of a customer and level of satisfaction can be evaluated through post purchase customer behavior (Khalifa, M., and Shen, N. ,2005). Customer perception of service quality of online banking services is putting a strong effect on the customer's level of satisfaction for bank's services over internet. (Chakib Hamadi, 2010).
When overall perceived quality of online banking services is good, there will be high level of customer's satisfaction with the online services of the bank.   Dataset has been shown convergent as measures of CR as well as AVE are exceeding limit of acceptability. CR's measure is from 0.732 to 0.905, which is more than range of acceptability of 0.7, as given in Table 2 & AVE higher than the range of acceptability of 0.5 and its range is between 0.603 & 0.694.

Discriminant Validity:
Measures taken diagonally (Square roots of mean variances explained) must be higher than measures not taken diagonally (correlations among construct). Table 2

PATH'S COEFFICIENTS WITH REGARD TO FRAMEWORK
Evaluation of framework was done through AMOS v21. As per the measures, all the hypotheses are significant measurement of p less than 0.01 (except H2, as its p value is 0.049, which is less than p value of 0.05. The details of all the hypotheses are given in the following table showing relations among the variables.  , 1993) in AMOS v21 has been followed to assess the mediation effect. Table 4 represents the estimates for Direct and Indirect effect at 95% bias-corrected bootstrapped Cis. In the Model, Customer Perception (CP) is partially mediating path ofService Quality (SQ) and Customer Satisfaction (CS) with Direct Effect measure of 0.351 (p=0.001) and indirect effect of 0.304 (p=0.001).

Conclusion:
The study was done to assess the mediating effect of customer perception in relation to qualities of services and satisfaction level of customer. EFA was done using SPSS 21 to explore the factors and three factors namely Service Quality (SQ), Customer Perception (CP) and Customer Satisfaction (CS) were extracted. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was done using SPSS AMOS 21 to test the validity of the theoretical model. Structural Equation Modeling was also done using SPSS AMOS 21 for assessing whether proposed theoretical model is valid or not. The measurements prove the strong relationship between qualities of services & customer' perceptions and direct relationship between customer's perceptions and satisfaction level of customer . Customer perception has also strong positive impact on customer satisfaction towards online banking services. The results of model fit indices prove the fitness of the model proposed for research. The result of mediation effect shows that there is a partial mediation of Customer's perception in relation to qualities of services and satisfaction level of customer. Future Scope of Study: This study can be further elaborated to do mediation analysis of customer perception, customer adoption and customer satisfaction in relation to services' quality and customer's loyalty.