IMPROVING BANK QUALITY DIMENSIONS TO INCREASE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

The purpose of this study is twofold: 1. examine the relationship between service quality dimensions and customer satisfaction with bank territorial units; 2. establish which quality measure method out of the four considered in this study should be applied in order to better determine the areas that need further improvement and investment. In this respect, we performed Principal Component Regression (PCR) and considered direct importance and performance measures as well. Our results reveal that human resources have the greatest impact on customers’ satisfaction with bank territorial units and that both “Convenience and Efficiency” and “Bank personnel” are the dimensions that bank management should consider in their efforts to improve and maintain the service quality level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which tries to emphasize the relationship between service quality dimensions and Romanian customers’ satisfaction with bank territorial units. The main limit of the study lies in the fact that data were collected among the customers of a single bank. Nevertheless, it provides valuable information about the Romanian market and ought to be considered a starting point for further studies.service quality, customer satisfaction, importance and performance measures, Romanian banking sector, principal component regression.

A EVALUATION OF CONSUMER’S PREFERENCES IN THE CLUJ-NAPOCA RETAIL MARKET BASED ON A MULTINOMIAL LOGIT MODEL

A long period of time investors were interested in the Bucharest market, butthe need for investment in the rest of the country, coupled with the highpotential markets present there, resulted in increasingly more investorsinterested in Romania, switching to provincial cities. The applicationpresented in this paper involves clients of several types of retail storespresent in the commercial area of Cluj-Napoca. The results obtained in thestudy, through the multinomial logit model, show different aspects of theclient’s behaviour from the Romanian retail market

Development of an Instrument for Measuring Student Satisfaction in Business Educational Institutions

As the number of prospective students decreases and competition intensifies, student satisfaction should be a core element of the universities' marketing strategy. Students' satisfaction is influenced by the degree to which higher education institutions meet or exceed their expectations. Higher education managers in general and business higher education managers in particular need to determine the students' level of satisfaction in order to assess their performance. This, however, is difficult to achieve because satisfaction is an abstract concept and no clear consensus exists over its definition and measurement. Although, on account of education's complexity and peculiarities, the investigation of satisfaction with educational services has been laborious, the literature review reveals a growing number of papers dealing with this issue. These papers consider the factors affecting satisfaction mostly as individual coefficients and ignore the latent relationships between constructs. However, since the determinants of partial student satisfaction simultaneously manifest in the overall satisfaction, it may be considered that an individual approach to them, would partially cover the issue being studied. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to develop a model for measuring student satisfaction with business education services, a model which should be approached holistically and whose latent structure should be taken into account. The proposed measurement tool, based on the study of the literature, was tested on the students of a business educational institution and the results confirm the goodness-of-fit, reliability and validity of the model. The developed tool encompasses a number of factors that allow the assessment of student satisfaction with a wide range of services provided by business education institutions and relate to: educational process (syllabus, training of teaching staff, examination policy), administrative staff, admission process (information, staff), management of the faculty, image of the faculty, library, general information, cafeteria, campus climate, tutors, collaboration between faculty and business environment, international cooperation, leisure activities supported by the faculty

Risk and perceived value: antecedents of customer satisfaction and loyalty in a sustainable business model

In the contemporary economic environment, each company that succeeds in creating and offering value to its clients/consumers will be able to survive in the market and even record profit for the medium and long time–thus value represents a driving force for a sustainable business model. Considering the significant role of perceived value within strategic management, the main purpose of this research is to identify and test an adequate conceptual frame in order to study the value concept and its connections with satisfaction, loyalty and perceived risk in order to offer a proper management tool for monitoring the sustainability of an existing business. So, this study proposed and tested concepts in the context of the S.M.E. market in Romania. Results show that both risk and value play a significant role in influencing satisfaction and customer loyalty, thus, in the end, company bottom line

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMERS - PROFILING AND SEGMENTATION

In any industry, the first step to finding and creating profitable customers isdetermining what drives profitability. This leads to better prospecting andmore successful customer relationship management. Any company cansegment and profile their customer base to uncover those profit drivers usingthe knowledge of their customers, products, and markets. Or they can usedata-driven techniques to find natural clusters in their customer or prospectbase. Whatever the method, the process will lead to knowledge andunderstanding that is critical to maintaining a competitive edg

THE POPULATION IN THE APUSENI MOUNTAINS AREA: PAST, PRESENT AND PERSPECTIVES (1900–2030)

Among the phenomena that drew attention to the Apuseni Mountains area, the population dynamics recorded over time has a prominent place. The present article carries out research regarding the evolution of this phenomenon over the last 110 years. The information the article relies upon was gathered from the censuses that were started in 1900 and continued in the years 1910, 1930, 1941, 1956, 1966, 1977, 1992 and 2011. The problem that requires attention nowadays concerning the population of the Apuseni Mountains is the constant and gradual population decline, which registered different intensities in all villages of the area included in the perimeter. The period we analyze witnessed different types of intervals: some of them were characterized by significant increases in population, others by relative stagnations and the last ones (since the 1966 census) by a dramatic reduction in the number of inhabitants. The demographic decline which has taken place in the Apuseni Mountains area over the last 60 year has, among other consequences, that of modifying the age structure of the population in an unfavorable direction with regards to the population stability in the area on the medium and long term. The changes in the population structure have led, and will continue to do so, to acceleration in the demographic decline over time. As it stands, the prognosis for the year 2030 underlines an increasingly worrisome situatio

IMPROVING BANK QUALITY DIMENSIONS TO INCREASE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

The purpose of this study is twofold: 1. examine the relationship betweenservice quality dimensions and customer satisfaction with bank territorialunits; 2. establish which quality measure method out of the four considered inthis study should be applied in order to better determine the areas that needfurther improvement and investment. In this respect, we performed PrincipalComponent Regression (PCR) and considered direct importance andperformance measures as well. Our results reveal that human resourceshave the greatest impact on customers’ satisfaction with bank territorial unitsand that both “Convenience and Efficiency” and “Bank personnel” are thedimensions that bank management should consider in their efforts to improveand maintain the service quality level. To the best of our knowledge, this isthe first study which tries to emphasize the relationship between servicequality dimensions and Romanian customers’ satisfaction with bank territorialunits. The main limit of the study lies in the fact that data were collectedamong the customers of a single bank. Nevertheless, it provides valuableinformation about the Romanian market and ought to be considered astarting point for further studies

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION REGARDING BANK’S DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS – THE ATM NETWORK

In addition to traditional distribution methods (network of territorial units), to better meet market requirements in terms of speed and efficiency of services, banks have developed interactive electronic and computerized systems for clients: banking services via telephone, internet banking, network of automatic teller machines (ATMs), Electronic Funds Transfer at point of sale (EFTPOS). Automatic Teller Machines have become in recent years one of the common instruments through which banks offer the possibility of conducting routine operations such as: cash withdrawals, bill payments, transfer between accounts. This article presents the results obtained following a research that focused on determining the customers’ degree of satisfaction with the distribution channels used by a Top Five Romanian Bank, in particular the ATMs distribution network