Abstract:
Banks as a service provider, offer similar kinds of products, and those are differed by the quality of
their service. Banks involved in the provision of a range of services including traditional banking
services and beyond that it involves the provision of self-banking services. When banks providing a
service, banks should have the ability to satisfy customers in the purchasing movement it is known as
service encounter. The concept of service encounter reveals that, direct interaction between customer
and service provider. This study focused on traditional and self-service bank encounter quality and
how it affects customer satisfaction. Recovery, spontaneity, and adaptability are the common
encounter themes that are available in the literature. However, traditional service encounter quality
measures are not efficient to measure the self-service encounter quality. The researcher had to
consider technology-based service quality measures to evaluate the self-service encounter quality
such as easy to use, convenience, security, and efficiency. A quantitative approach was used to
conduct the research and data were collected from 171 youth state bank account holders in the
western province through a Stratified random sampling technique therefore, Bank of Ceylon, People's
Bank, National Savings Bank, Regional Development Bank selected for the study due to their huge
branch network compared to other public banks. The online survey method used to collect the data
and SPSS 25 software was used to analysing the data. The hypotheses were tested by using Co-
relations analysis and simple linear regression, and multiple linear regression was used to analyse the
research objectives. Findings reveal that, the strong positive impact of encounter service quality
towards customer satisfaction (0.811). In addition that, traditional and self-service encounter quality
has a positive and significant impact on bank customer encounter satisfaction. Spontaneity is the
highest contributor for the traditional service encounter quality while recovery shows minimum
contribution. When considering the Self-service encounter respectively convenience, ease to use,
security, and efficiency significantly impact the encounter satisfaction. Furthermore, Self-service is
the most promising banking method in the youth. However, banks have to set a precedent benchmark
in both banking methods to offer greater convenience to customers.
Keywords: Service encounter quality; Service encounter satisfaction; State bank
