Exploring eservice quality a study of Irish online banking

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of selfservice banking technology and investigates customers' perceptions of internet banking selfservice within the Irish financial services sector. This qualitative study of the Irish retail banking sector explored consumers' ebanking interactions and experiences in addition to assessing the dimensions critical to ebanking service quality. Designmethodologyapproach A purposive sampling technique was employed to recruit 20 consumers representing the desired range of demographic characteristics e.g. sex, age, profession, previous internet experience levels and productrelated knowledge. Findings Despite commonalities between traditional service quality and ebanking service quality dimensions, due to the remote form of the online encounter, many traditional service quality attributes were found to be redundant and instead edimensions such as web usability, trust, access and information quality service recovery and flexibility emerged as important to ebanking service provision. Based on an extant review of the literature ten eservice dimensions were proposed and evaluated empirically in the context of ebanking service quality. Overall, process quality emerged as key within the online context, with nine out of the ten proposed ebanking dimensions relating to the service process. Originalityvalue The paper contributes to previous research by adding to existing knowledge regarding what constitutes ebanking service and the determinants critical to ebanking service quality. The paper makes key recommendations towards enhancing current online financial services quality and delivery.