The Role of Sales Agents in Achieving Service Quality of Life Insurance in Bhutan

Abstract

A dramatic process and evolution of marketing diverted its attention from the focus of products to services. Each country by its own standards tried to move in pace with this new development. Bhutan too has been through this phase and is trying to cater to the demands of customers through service quality. Selling of life insurance business in Bhutan started in 1975 with the establishment of RICBL. It has ever since been the only provider of this service in the country. Over the period of time RICBL has positioned its spotlight on marketing and recruitment of sales agents with the best of intentions to capture the untapped market and benefit the society at large.

This research thesis is written and focused on service quality of life insurance. The area of expectation and perception of service quality from both the customers who are serviced by sales agents as well as those who have availed life insurance policy through the employees have been explored. Also, the research aims to find the value added of sales agents in RICBL. The views of the management, sales agents and employees on perception of customer’s expectation have been taken to verify if they are in line with what customers actually expect. SERVQUAL model, which is a highly recognized method of evaluating service quality, has been used to measure these gaps.
The survey involved 100 respondents; 50 each serviced by sales agents and employees from Thimphu region that falls in the jurisdiction of the Head Office of RICBL. The respondents were randomly selected to be surveyed between the timeframe June to July, 2014. STATA was used to generate the findings and interpretation was made through the use of pie charts, bar diagrams and tables through excel. Here gap scores have been computed by finding the difference between perception and expectation of the respondents by using Gap 1 of the service quality model. The findings showed that the overall gap scores were negative for both the categories of customers except for Tangible dimension dealing with the physical aspects of service quality dimension. Through the findings, it was indicated that employees performed slightly better compared to sales agents although the gaps were both comparatively large.

The gap between the expectations of customers with the view of management, sales agents and employees on dimensions of service quality was measured through Gap 5 of the service quality model. These areas of gaps discovered through the Gap 1 and Gap 5 have been discussed and recommendations proposed.

It was found out that there was a negative gap in the findings of the study. It is recommended that service quality should be improved for meeting the customer’s expectations as well to face new challenges that will arise in the coming future from new competitors.