Customers’ perceptions of self-service quality : a qualitative case study in the Swedish banking sector

Sammanfattning: Self-service technology, SST, enables the customer to interact with a service without contact with an employee. This technology has several benefits for both customers and businesses and is a powerful tool to achieve long term success. So the quality of an SST becomes crucial for businesses in order to achieve long term success. Therefore, it becomes essential to measure the quality of an SST. The Self-service quality scale (SSTQUAL scale) purpose is to measure SST quality in several industries. The developer of this instrument, Lin and Hsieh (2011) encouraged others to do further research on the SSTQUAL scale since it is a continuous process and may change over time. Previous studies have shown that the SSTQUAL scale within the Romanian baking sector is revised. Therefore, the focus of this study will be to evaluate how service quality and the SSTQUAL scale fits in the Swedish banking sector. The study aims to identify how forest and agricultural customers in the Swedish banking sector perceive SST quality. The work is structured based on a specific case in a Swedish bank to capture how the customer perceives SST quality in these settings, and thus, the aim fulfills. The result from this study reveals that the respondents perceive five dimensions, design, functionality, security, customization, and convenience as crucial for the quality of an SST in the Swedish banking sector. The conclusions are that the customers perceive design, functionality, and convenience as the most crucial dimensions for SST quality. Further research is needed for a generalization of the result and to determine if the SSTQUAL scale is an instrument suitable for measuring SST quality in the Swedish banking sector.