Browsing by Author "Chaltu Abiy"

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    The Mediating Role of Customer Trust in the Relationship between Digital Banking Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: The Case of Awash Bank, Addis Ababa
    (Addis Ababa University, 2026-11-05) Chaltu Abiy; Getie Andualem,( PhD)
    This study examined the mediating role of customer trust in the relationship between digital banking service quality dimensions and customer satisfaction among active digital banking customers of Awash Bank in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Despite substantial investment in digital banking infrastructure, trust gaps created by fears of hacking and concerns over system reliability create a psychological barrier between technical service quality and customer satisfaction, motivating this investigation into customer trust as a mediating mechanism. A quantitative explanatory research design was adopted, and data were gathered from active digital banking users across four purposively selected Awash Bank branches through a purposive intercept sampling technique. Digital banking service quality was measured through four dimensions of the E-S-QUAL model: efficiency, system availability, privacy, and responsiveness. Data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling via smartpls software, alongside IBM SPSS Statistics for descriptive analysis. The structural model demonstrated strong explanatory power for both customer trust and customer satisfaction, with all proposed path relationships found to be statistically significant. Privacy emerged as the strongest predictor of customer trust, while responsiveness demonstrated the greatest direct influence on customer satisfaction. Customer trust was found to have a strong positive relationship with customer satisfaction. The mediation analysis confirmed that customer trust partially mediates the relationship between each digital banking service quality dimension and customer satisfaction, indicating that digital banking service quality influences satisfaction both directly through its technical elements and indirectly through the trust it builds among customers. The study concludes that technical service excellence alone is insufficient to achieve customer satisfaction in Ethiopia's digital banking context. Awash Bank should strengthen trust mechanisms, reinforce security measures, and enhance responsive support services to sustain customer loyalty and long-term satisfaction in its digital banking operations