Customer Satisfaction in the Cooperative Banking industry: a quantitative approach.

Sammanfattning: [Introduction] Cooperative banks in France have a major impact on the finance industry and the French economy. The French financial ecosystem differs in comparison with other European countries because of a higher number of cooperative banking groups, which have a dominant market share in the financial industry. With a highly competitive retail banking market frequently described as a commoditized space, customer satisfaction remains the largest competitive advantage for banks. [Research Purpose] Overall, the ambition with this research was to gain a deeper understanding of customer satisfaction in the retail banking market segment. The fundament of this thesis is a theoretical framework that analyzed customer satisfaction for retail clients of cooperative banks. By this, we identified which characteristic of the relationship between customers and their cooperative bank have the highest impact on customer satisfaction. Thus, our research question implied a search to explain an underlying causal relationship between six different variables within Perceived Quality and Perceived Value with customer satisfaction. Perceived Value (PV) included Trust, Employee Competences, and Price Transparency. Perceived Quality (PQ) included Accessibility, Reliability, and Reactivity. [Methodology] By adopting a quantitative approach, we could test, support and rank which variables impact customer satisfaction for cooperative banking clients. The analyzed dataset comprises a total of 21 914 respondents which are customers from 142 cooperative banking branches in France. [Results & Conclusion] From the analysis of the empirical results, we answered our research question by detailing the relationships between perceived quality; perceived value, and customer satisfaction. Finally, our findings indicated that Perceived Quality contributes to customer satisfaction in cooperative banking to a larger extend than Perceived Value. Moreover, the study ranked the importance of each variables impacting customer satisfaction as follow: (1) Accessibility, (2) Employee Competences, (3) Trust, (4) Reliability, (5) Price Transparency, (6) Reactivity.