Information about market, customers and competitors is an important success factor in quality management for financial service providers. Concretely, a recommended approach in this topic area is presented, applicable market research methods are described and compared.

Quality management in the financial service industry can have significant impact on customer loyalty and profitability as well as on brand strength. Customers often resign due to critical service encounters; in contrast, a high quality appraisal may result in high loyalty and reduced price sensitivity. In addition, service quality is often the main source of information for the customer to judge the company, as delivered financial products are abstract, often complex and difficult to assess.

The article recommends separating the questions of identification of quality criteria first, second measuring relevance and fixing benchmarks for each criteria and third, on-going measurement of the company's service quality along the identified quality criteria. For all steps, available market research methods are presented. A comparative strength-weaknesses analysis of the methods allows deriving the optimal market research method portfolio.

The traditional approach of many financial service providers - using quality surveys only - may be highly ineffective, as not all of the recommended process steps are followed and the surveys only partially measure the relevant criteria. A more systematic process of setting up quality management and a completion of the applied method portfolio seems unavoidable.