Quality and Online Banking Case Study: “We Bank” Attijari Bank in Tunisia

Introduction

Internet and the digital expansion have instigated the soaring of online banks. These banks offer free or cheap online services because as its name states it, it functions only online. These banks and especially the apps are particularly attractive to young consumers who are usually tech savvy users, in order to carry out transfers and various other operations. Only a small number of them resort to going to the agency. Online banks also target all those who wish to have a complete autonomy and are well satisfied with virtual relationships, knowing that online banks offer a great variety of contact ways. This is the outcome of technological competitiveness (Mujinga, 2020).

To satisfy and retain its consumers, online banks have to provide a high standard of services, updates and information owing to the fact that, it impacts the consumers’ experience. As a consequence, if the consumers consider that the payment system is weak and the answers are slow or tardy, online bank usage would diminish drastically. Hence the necessity of a customer service meant to listen and understand the users’ issues; thus the service quality would inevitably improve. This initiative would certainly lead to the consumers’ satisfaction because the interaction with the employees of the customer service influences positively this service usage intention. The customer service should cope with the complaints received from the customers’ calls. As a result, the online bank system can increase the consumers’ satisfaction and improve their experience as a whole.

Indeed, as defined by Nunkoo and Dwivedi (2018), the online bank service and information quality represents the support received by the user. The best representatives and responsible for this type of quality are the Integration Technology (IT) services and the support system (Delone & McLean, 2003; Seddiki & Rastogi, 2017). For this reason, Pitt et al. (1995) insisted on the inclusion of the service quality as an important measurement in order to insure the IT system efficiency. In addition, Gefen (2002) noted that the online bank gateway presents numerous problems such as, the technical constraints of a mobile device for instance (Kuo & Deng, 2009).

These researches have shown that the online bank’s service and information quality were at the heart of research studies led during these last decades. Consequently, various models have been developed to explain what quality stands for. They proved that there were mainly two different approaches or strategies. The first approach is based on the confirmation of the measuring scales concerning the customer’s perception and expectations in terms of quality. The second approach simply consists in confirming the measuring scales of online banks performances. In fact, these two approaches are divergent but complementary to evaluate the online bank’s quality. These research models dimensions showed their importance to gauge the quality of the online banks in order to satisfy and retain the various clients.

The results of the survey conducted from June 17 to June 24 2020 on behalf 3,285 individuals showed that 41.5% tend to trust the online bank services. Only 23% of the people interviewed prefer going to the agency. The study reveals that the online bank is gaining more and more market shares and that the bank’s digitalization is more and more regarded as a must. Concerning the detailed reasons leading to the choice of the main bank as well as the means used; interviews revealed that 1/5 of the interviewed is dissatisfied with its bank. For these dissatisfied consumers, 38.9% of them consider that the service quality and the communication quality are despicable.

Moreover, according to US data Lightico, March 2020 the banking use exploded because of Covid-19 pandemic and the containment that followed.

Thanks to these findings, the research question that motivated this study therefore concerns how the quality of online banking is determinant for the customer’s satisfaction and the bank’s ranking within the market. Consequently, our research question would be dedicated to the identification of the criteria that allowed we bank to be acknowledged as a quality bank.

Thus, in order to familiarize with the Tunisian online banks quality, in this chapter we focused on the Attijari online bank « Webank ». This bank enables the customers to live a new experience which starts with the opening of a remote account and continues with the follow-up of these operations, the management of the card, the loan application etc. Thanks to « Webank », the customer would benefit from the online bank services daily while enjoying a high level of security and up to date information in real time.