Linking customer satisfaction, employee appraisal, and business performance: an evaluation methodology in the banking sector

The linkage among customer satisfaction, employee evaluation, and business performance data is very important in modern business organizations. Several previous research efforts have studied this linkage, focusing mainly on the financial or business performance in order to analyze the efficiency of an organization. However, recent studies have tried to consider other important performance indicators, which are able to affect business operations and future growth (e.g., external and internal customer satisfaction). In the case of the banking industry, studying the relations among the aforementioned variables is able to give insight in the performance evaluation of bank branches and the viability analysis of the banking organization. This paper presents a real-world study for measuring the relative efficiency of a set of bank branches using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. In particular, a multistage DEA network model is proposed, using a set of performance indicators that combine customer satisfaction, employee evaluation, and business performance indices. The main aim of the presented study is to evaluate the relative efficiency of each customer service delivery step, in the environment of a bank branch. The results are also able to estimate the contribution of the assessed performance indicators to the branch's overall efficiency, and to determine potential improvement actions.