Effect of privatization on customer satisfaction: Credit Department of Mashhad Saderat Bank of Iran

With the advent of private banks in the past decade, the Iranian banks that have been established on the state resources felt threatened and made some fundamental changes in their structures. As a result, most of these banks tend to undergo privatization. Certainly, in a highly competitive and monopoly-away market, it is important for private banks and other non-governmental financial institutions to pay special attention to demands and requests of their own customers and try to meet their satisfaction. The present paper taken from application research has been conducted by cross-sectional and survey method in order to study the effect of privatization on customer satisfaction of credit department of Saderat Bank. Based on the findings of the research, privatization affects on improving three latent variables of satisfaction: customers expectation, inferred quality of bank services and value of received service and finally leads to customer satisfaction.   Key words: Banking, customer satisfaction, privatization.