Trustworthiness of Service Providers: A Comparison of Alternative Models

The recent global economic slowdown and its severe effect on the performance of financial sector have decline customers’ confidence in their banks. In such a scenario, maintaining customers’ trust has become a strategic priority for the current players in the highly competitive Indian banking industry. This is because it acts as a key differentiating factor that leads to customer loyalty and increase in profitability. Existing literature suggests that trustworthiness is a multi-dimensional construct which plays a significant role in both developing and maintaining customers’ overall trust. Hence, it is of paramount importance for Indian banks to gain a thorough understanding about the dimensions of trustworthiness in order to project a trustworthy image in the minds of consumers. Given the critical nature of company’s trustworthiness, a rich body of literature has studied it from various perspectives like customer loyalty, firm performance etc. However, there is still a need to conduct an in-depth investigation in order to develop a better understanding about the dimensions of trustworthiness. Therefore, this study proposes to explore the higher models of trustworthiness to fulfill the above research gap.