Assessing the impact of emotional intelligence on employee customer service delivery: A case study of banking sector in Ghana

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Date
2014-07-25
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Many banks in Ghana have been faced with customer litigations and customer base reduction leading to business failures, customer corporate disputes and sometimes closures by regulatory authorities. Efforts by bank managers to improve on customer service has led to the enactment of different policies. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, two sets of questionnaires were administered to 100 employees and 100 customers operating within the Accra and Tema Metropolis with focus on five banks using convenience sampling techniques. It was generally observed that customers prefer to deal with employees who have a higher level of emotional intelligence compared to employees who have a lower level of emotional intelligence. The findings further show that a higher level of employee emotional intelligence has a positive effect on customer service irrespective of the location of the bank. A Majority of the banks were however not aware or had little knowledge about emotional intelligence as a tool for superior customer service. The study concluded that banks that had benefited from higher employee emotional intelligence did not only increase their customer base but their employees also acquired an added advantage if employee training was accompanied with monitoring, technical skills and expertise, access to management, counseling and education and a reputation for improving emotional intelligence. The study recommends that banks need to recognize the potential advantages of seeking out and hiring employees with higher levels of emotional intelligence. Also bank managers can train employees to acquire high emotional intelligence skills. Moreover managers must be involved in mentoring subordinates to acquire and use these emotional intelligence skills to solve customer service-related problems. Government and policy makers should play a dual role as both facilitators and educators in encouraging educational institutions and business organizations to train students and employees to be emotionally intelligent in order to promote employee emotional intelligence. Following from the conclusions and recommendation a more detailed research on emotional intelligence involving other non-financial organizations from the private and public sectors is highly recommended.
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A thesis submitted to the Department of Social Sciences of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial fulfillment of the award of the degree of Master of Business Administration (Human Resources Management).
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