Bank Selection Criteria and SERVQUAL Survey among Muslims in Mauritius

As a Muslim minority country located far off the east coast of South Africa, Mauritius has successfully introduced Islamic finance since 1998. However, the development is not as expected since two Islamic banking windows were closed down and the only Islamic commercial bank in the country has been struggling hard in order to generate favorable expected profits. The aims of this study are to investigate the bank selection criteria among Muslims in Mauritius and to evaluate the customer satisfaction upon the Islamic banking service quality in the country. The findings show that privacy, easy access, service quality, facilities, transparency and bank reputation are the factors influence Muslim Mauritian to patronize bank and interestingly religion and religiosity are out of it. The importance – performance analysis is used to provide an interesting visual analysis on the service quality items examined. The findings suggest that Islamic banks must improve their Tangible and Reliability aspects in order to satisfy the customers and eventually become more profitable.