Finding critical criteria of evaluating electronic service quality of Internet banking using fuzzy multiple-criteria decision making

Internet banking provides users diverse financial service through the Internet. Under the environment of drastic competition, in order to make customers proceed with transactions on the web site, Internet banking not only should provide complete functions of operations but also advance their electronic service quality. The electronic service quality evaluation for Internet banking can be treated as a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. As for evaluating the electronic service quality, since the traditional Likert scale cannot deal with uncertain assessments according to human intuition for the service quality evaluation, fuzzy numbers are employed to measure decision-makers' subjective preferences. This paper treats the given hierarchical network with the fuzzy MCDM as a feed-forward neural network and aims to develop a genetic-algorithm-based method to automatically determine degrees of importance of respective criteria. Then, critical criteria for evaluating service quality can be easily identified. In the empirical study, five domestic banks belonging to financial holding companies in Taiwan are selected to find critical criteria. The findings provide useful information to Internet banks for improving the electronic service quality. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.