The banking sector is one of the sectors that used to be a stable environment, however, where competition has more intense lately. In this specific sector there is not much room for differentiation. The reason why banks have problems differentiating themselves is because most banks fill the same function. Banks can, through providing high service quality, increase customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to retaining existing and acquiring new customers. The need for providing excellent customer service in the specific sector is of importance due to the market being homogeneous. The purpose of this article is to help the bank raise the level of customer satisfaction, through deepened knowledge regarding their customers’ expectations. The purpose will be reached by analyzing the expectation gaps between SBI in Tiruchirappalli district and its customers. This exploratory research was refined with their subsequent scale named SERVQUAL for measuring customer’s satisfaction. A pilot test was also conducted on customers of SBI. A structured questionnaire has been developed with twenty three (23) components of service quality grouped under five dimensions of service quality, namely, reliability, tangibility, responsiveness, assurance and empathy with a numerical scale having two verbal descriptors, namely, ‘Strongly Disagree (= 1)’ and ‘Strongly Agree (= 5)’ at the two extremes of the scale. Mean, standard deviation, cluster analysis and t- test have been used for analyzing the responses of customers. Out of 100 questionnaires, 17 are found incomplete and 83 are fully complete. The data collected were analysed with the help of SPSS to identify the gaps. The Cronbach alpha, a measure of internal consistency obtained is 0.996 which is considered to be excellent. This study aims to identify the gaps in the dimensions of service quality by administering SERVQUAL model among the customers in State Bank of India.

KEYWORDS: Customer Satisfaction, Expectations, Servqual, Gaps.