Ranking the branches of a private bank through the service quality gap approach and by using multi criteria decision making

Nowadays, service provider companies play a crucial role in the economic progress in many countries. They are responsible for the gross national product, though due to its role in supporting other industries, banking is of critical importance among other service providers, it is vital for all the banks to satisfy their customers. In order to evaluate service quality and to attempt to improve it, it is possible to evaluate service quality gap, which is defined as the gap between the customers' expectations and the customers' perception on Parasuraman model and also includes five main dimensions of tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. In this paper, Parasuraman service quality model is employed to evaluate the service quality gap in the seven branches of a private bank and also two methods of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) is used to rank them. Finally, the merged result along with sensitivity analyses, applied on service quality dimensions, revealed that the reliability gap is the most important dimension among five other ones.