Identification Of Key Factors Of User Satisfaction For Banking Software Products And Development Of An Importance-Performance Map

Abstract

The Indian IT industry has grown at an impressive rate during the last decade. India's own competitive advantage in the software business is well known: cost-effectiveness, world-class quality, high reliability, and rapid delivery, all of it powered by state-of-the-art technologies. Software has penetrated different spheres of the Indian economy, namely Indian corporate sector, government and public sector units. Over the last decade, one of the sectors, which have felt the "heat" of software intrusion, has been the financial service. Indian banking industry, today is in the midst of an IT revolution. A combination of regulatory and competitive reasons have led to increasing importance of total banking automation in the Indian Banking Industry. The present level of computerization in Public Sector Banks is a result of these initiatives. RBI has also gone ahead in creating of nation wide and localized networks for integration of the entire financial system.

The Software Packages for Banking Applications in India had their beginnings in the middle of 80s, when the Banks spurred on by RBI and the Rangarajan Committee Report, started computerizing the branches in a limited manner.

A few software companies in the country have developed banking software products and most of the banks have adopted them. These products enable all the banks to automate their operations at the branches and corporate offices. The software companies develop 60% of the software in the company itself, which involves the development of modules, and the remaining 40% is done in the customer's site. This 40% is customization of the software. The success of these banking software products in the banks can be measured by studying the market share of the individual products, revenues earned by these products by the respective companies. The success of these products depends on the satisfaction of the users, using the software. To measure their satisfaction and arrive at those products that are performing well in terms of User satisfaction, the following objectives were designed in the present study.

The objectives are:

1. To understand the attributes of the banking software products that are relevant to user/customer satisfaction. 2. To understand the user's perception of the above attributes. 3. To derive the key factors of user/customer satisfaction. 4. To develop an Importance-Performance map for the attributes of the software.

Based on the literature review and the discussions held with the software professionals and bank employees, we identified few relevant variables like Implementation, Maintainability, Reliability, Security, User's Performance and Output which fall under the software related variables and variables like Vendor's meeting User's needs, Vendor's mktg skill, User involvement, Training and support, and Service falling under the vendor related variables.

A structured questionnaire was developed based on these variables using a 5-pt likert scale and this instrument was checked for its construct and content validity and also Reliability by conducting Factor analysis and Computing Cronbach's alpha respectively on a small sample in the Pilot study. The questionnaire was modified and the final instrument was used for the main study. This questionnaire was administered on a sample of 141 in the main study. The collected data were subjected to Factor Analysis to arrive at the key factors of User satisfaction for banking software products. We obtained seven factors User's Performance, Output, and Vendor's Marketing skill, Implementation, Ease of Use, Security and Maintainability.

The second part of the study plot an Importance -Performance Map for all the products on all variables which gives us the best performer. Since this was subjective analysis, we conducted ONE-WAY ANOVA on the data to arrive at the best performer. However, ANOVA could give only the top performer, but we were not able to identify the second best product.

We computed the weighted scores for each of these products by giving weights to the variables and multiplying with the performance scores. The comparison of the total weighted scores of all the four products considered in the study helped us in ranking the products based on their performance. We obtained that Product 3 was on top followed by Product 4 and Product 1 and last was product 2.

Based on these analyses we suggested the following to the software vendors:

1. The key factors identified in the study should be given the highest priority while developing and testing the software for conformance with the specifications. 2. Product 2 must be improved on variables like output by making the report generation more flexible and maintainability should be made easier by making additions more flexible without any errors. 3. Vendors of Product 1 and 2 should provide better user manuals using simple language and also train the bank employees in using the software, by involving employees during customization in a more informal way. 4. Vendor's of Product 3 and 4 should maintain the quality of their existing products respectively and try to improve them.