A STUDY OF THE FACTORS LEADING TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: A CASE STUDY OF A PRIVATE BANKING INSTITUTION IN MANDALAY, MYANMAR

Recently, the market of the banking industries is growing rapidly in Myanmar. Therefore, banks not only need to focus on attracting new customers but also on maintaining the existing customers by providing the exceptional quality of services in order to survive in extremely stiff competitive industry. This research is attempted to investigate the 5 determinants which lead to customer satisfaction to Ayeyarwaddy Bank (AYA) in Mandalay, Myanmar. The questionnaires were distributed to 200 people who have been experienced of using the service of the 2 branches of the AYA Bank in the same city. Single & multiple linear regression model were used in order to test the hypotheses to find out the beta coefficient and significant level. The finding is that all of the service quality dimensions such as reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibility are rejected and statistically influenced on the customer satisfaction.


Introduction
Since every bank offers nearly the same products and services without much room to compete on price, the satisfaction level of customers has become a vital tool for the banks to survive in the competitive industry. According to Berry et al (2002), customer satisfaction became one of the essential performance measures with other financial indicators such as sales value, profit margin, and so on. Since Myanmar banking industries are developing with a speedy rate, Myanmar banks are facing with more competitive in building up their innovative services such as online payment system, mobile banking and other related applications. Besides, government allowed foreign banks to grant loans, to take deposits from foreign corporations and domestic banks in both international currency and Myanmar Kyat. \ Therefore, there is an extremely competitive among banks in Myanmar. There are 4 state owned banks, 9 semi-governmental banks, 14 private banks, 13 foreign bank branches and 49 representative office of foreign banks in Myanmar. Among them, the researcher selected AYA Bank because it is the second largest private bank in Myanmar since 2010. Moreover, there are 242 branches in all over the country with 4.7 trillion customer deposits (kyats) and 150 billion Shareholders' Equity. In order to live up in the highly competitive market, customer satisfaction has become a priority for AYA bank to use as a tool of marketing success.

Research Objective
To investigate the relationship between service quality dimensions in terms of reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibility and the customer satisfaction in Myanmar banking industries.

Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
Service Quality Dimensions: Parasuraman et al (1985) and Zeithaml (1988) discovered service quality as customer's analysis on the level of the excellent performance of the service. Based on Parasuraman et al. (1988), service quality has five components which are reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles.
I. Reliability: Parasuraman et al. (1988) observed reliability as the capacity of service organizations to satisfy the guaranteed service exactly and precisely. Parasuraman et al. (1988) discovered responsiveness as the willingness of a firm to helps the customers' requirements and to serve quick service to them. Parasuraman et al. (1988) found out assurance as employee's kindness, intelligence and sympathy and their performance to get the customers' trust and confidence.

III. Assurance:
IV. Empathy: Parasuraman et al. (1988) characterized empathy as employee's caring and giving attention to each customer which is provided by an organization.
V. Tangibles: Parasuraman et al. (1988) referred tangibles as the modern equipment which can improve the service quality of customers due to the fact that certain countries have many old fashion customers and lack of technology. These can be included facilities and appearance of the employees.
Customer Satisfaction: Fornell (2001) discovered the key term "customer satisfaction" as a key establishment of marketing achievement, with a fulfilled consumer base assuming a fundamental role in accomplishing firm's competitiveness. In addition, this relies upon an organizations' capacity to fulfill the requirements and needs of its target market.
George and Kumar (2014) also found out service quality is an important determinants for customer satisfaction which means that the perceived service quality is directly proportional to the customer satisfaction in modern financial and banking sectors. According to the related literature review, the researcher established a conceptual framework. In this framework, there are five null and alternative hypotheses to verify the relationship between independent and dependent variables. Sub-hypothesis 1: The service quality dimension in term of reliability has influence on Customer Satisfaction.

Sub-hypothesis 2:
The service quality dimension in term of responsiveness has influence on Customer Satisfaction.

Sub-hypothesis 3:
The service quality dimension in term of assurance has influence on Customer Satisfaction.

Sub-hypothesis 4:
The service quality dimension in term of empathy has influence on Customer Satisfaction.

Sub-hypothesis 5:
The service quality dimension in term of tangibility has influence on Customer Satisfaction. According to the α value results, all of the variables are reliable and consistent with the values more than 0.7.

General Information
The results of the descriptive analysis shown in Table 2 (below) proved that the majority of the respondents are male (104 or 52%), and most of the respondents are married (98 or 49.3%), and the age are between 26 to 35 years old (84 or 42%). Most of them got Bachelor Degree and the majority of the respondents are the employees in the private organization with the salary level 200,001-400,000 MMK (around $150-350). Most of the respondents came to bank to transfer money locally and internationally and came there less than 3 times per month. (Sig. = .000) therefore rejected H 0 and accepted H 1 , this implies that the service quality dimension in term of reliability has influence on Customer Satisfaction significantly at the level 0.05.

Responsiveness
: The service quality dimension in term of responsiveness has influence on Customer Satisfaction. The analysis show that the sig. value less than 0.05 (Sig. = .000) therefore rejected H 0 and accepted H 1 , this implies that the service quality dimension in term of responsiveness has influence on Customer Satisfaction significantly at the level 0.05.

Assurance
: The service quality dimension in term of assurance has influence on Customer Satisfaction. The analysis shows that the sig. value less than 0.05 (Sig. = .000) therefore rejected H 0 and accepted H 1 , this implies that the service quality dimension in term of assurance has influence on Customer Satisfaction significantly at the level 0.05.

Empathy
: The service quality dimension in term of empathy has influence on Customer Satisfaction. The analysis shows that the sig. value less than 0.05 (Sig. = .000) therefore rejected H 0 and accepted H 1 , this implies that the service quality dimension in term of empathy has influence on Customer Satisfaction significantly at the level 0.05.

Tangibility
: The service quality dimension in term of tangibility has influence on Customer Satisfaction. The analysis shows that the sig. value less than 0.05 (Sig. = .000) therefore rejected H 0 and accepted H 1 , this implies that the service quality dimension in term of tangibility has influence on Customer Satisfaction significantly at the level 0.05.

Discussion
Researcher found that service quality dimension in term of responsiveness has the strongest influence customer satisfaction based on the β value and significant level at .377 and .000 respectively. Therefore, it can conclude that customers are satisfied with the responsiveness of bank staffs from whom they get the prompt and actual service. Moreover, bank staffs are always willing to help customers and always ready to fulfill customers' requirements.
On the other hand, the result is supported by many previous researchers (El Saghier and Nathan, 2013;Lau et al. (2013). Krishnamurthy et al. (2010) also recommended that responsiveness is an important factor for overall satisfaction in Indian banking service. For reliability, assurance and empathy determinants, the P-values are 0.023, 0.000 and 0.000 respectively. These reject the hypothesis since they are less than 0.05 which indicates the moderate customer satisfaction. However, the determinant of Tangibles was the only one that is not statistically significant with the value of 0.094 which is slightly higher than 0.05. It can be because the banking industry in Myanmar could not offer modern technology devices such as high-speed internet and ATM machine and most of the local customers do not possess the knowledge of using mobile application.

Recommendation and Further study
In case of usual business cannot provide service leading to unsatisfactory or unavailable for some reason, then current customers would have no reason to spend much effort weighing up the alternatives when all are likely to be satisfactory. The results showed that service quality dimensions in terms of reliability, empathy and tangibles have a very low significant influence on customer. Therefore, the researcher recommends AYA bank team to offer the services to customers promptly. As the country is a developing country and most of the Myanmar people have lack of knowledge about the technology and IT devices, AYA bank should support more user-friendly machines and assigned staffs to support the customer in order to explain how to use the applications or machines. For instance, most of the customers are not familiar with ATM (automatic teller machine) and mobile banking for transferring money. Therefore, AYA bank needs to provide modern machines which are more userfriendly for customers and needs to do more advertisement for these value-added services. To improve the satisfaction of the customers, AYA bank should give sustainable training to staffs to be more willing to insist customers and to give individual attention to all customers as well as the staffs should be neat and well-dressed during the working hour.
In this finding, the researcher used independent variables such as service quality dimensions (reliability, tangibles, empathy, responsiveness and assurance) to determine the customer satisfaction of AYA bank in Mandalay, Myanmar. However, further researchers can apply different independent variables which may have influence on customer satisfaction in the future such as word of mouth (WOM) and repurchase intention and customer loyalty.