During the past two decades, there has been growing trend in Iranian banking industry due to change in banking regulations. Private sector has grown rapidly and there have been several new banks on the market, which has created very competitive market. Therefore, customer loyalty is the key factor for running a successful banking business and customer relationship management (CRM) appears to be important for the success in this industry. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between CRM and customer loyalty in one of the oldest Iranian banks named Bank Melli Iran. The proposed study prepares a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among some regular customers of this bank. The preliminary results of this survey have indicated that consumer’s gender, age and educational background had no meaningful impact on quality of services. In other words, people with different personal characteristics expect the same quality of services from banking industry and there is a positive and meaningful relationship between quality of services and customer loyalty.

Consumer perception plays essential role for market development. Consumer perception can be defined as a marketing concept, which includes a customer & apos; s impression, awareness and/or consciousness about a firm or its offerings. This paper investigates the effect of customer relationship management factors on consumer perception in Iranian banking industry. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 300 randomly selected managers who worked for Bank Saderat Iran. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.788, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. Using principal component analysis, the study has determined that six factors influences the most on consumer perception; namely: Customer oriented, Organizational strategy, Organizational resources, Organizational structure and Organizational culture.

Cultural intelligence (CQ) is a new area of research, which is considered in different areas including banking industry. In this paper, we design a questionnaire in Likert scale and measure CQ in banking industry. The proposed study of this paper distributes 53 questionnaires among 60 employees of bank Sarmyeh, which is one of the private banks in Iran. The study also distributes a standard questionnaire among them to measure the performance of the same employees. Cronbach alpha are calculated for both questionnaires as 0.8155 and 0.9421, respectively. The study calculates Pearson correlation ratio between these two items and the result indicates that there is a positive (0.41) and meaningful relationship between CQ and performance measurement. In addition, there is a positive and meaningful relationship between motivational CQ and performance measurement (0.378). However, the survey does not find any meaningful relationship between cognitive CQ, metacognitive CQ and behavioral CQ on one side and performance measurement.

One of the primary concerns in banking industry is to measure the relative importance of banking industry using popular multi criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In this paper, we use these two MCDM techniques to measure the relative efficiencies of 16 private and governmental banks in terms of electronic payment. There are three inputs with DEA methods including the number of issued cards, the number of ATM machines and the number of POSs and there are two outputs including the number of successful ATMs and the number of successful POSs transactions. The proposed study of this paper uses the necessary data of one of Iranian provinces and the results of the implementation of DEA and TOPSIS have indicated that 9 out of 16 banks were efficient. Our study also indicates that mean of relative efficiency for private banks was 82% while this number was 75% for governmental banks.

This paper investigates the relationship between different granting loans and bank deposits in some governmental banks in province of Semnan, Iran. For the proposed study of this paper, equipment of resources includes cash account, zero-interest account, short term investment and long term investment and these are considered as dependent variables. There are also seven types of granting loans devoted to customers, which are partnership loans, zero-interest loans, civic participation, contract quantity loans, future contract loans, rent-purchase loans and installment sales loans. The study considers the financial information of 171 governmental banks located in province of Semnan, Iran over the period 2006-2011. The results of our study indicate that five variables maintain positive impact on dependent variable. The highest impact belongs to Partnership loans (0.34), followed by Sales loans (0.24), contract quantity loans (0.21) and Zero-interest loans (0.16) and Future contract loans (0.14) come in the last position. The study also uses Freedman test to rank dependent factors and the results indicate that short- term investment is number one priority followed by long term investment and the other two options including zero-interest and cash accounts are in lower priority.

During the past few years, information and communication technology (ICT) has revolutionized banking industry in the world. People are now able to do their business banking activities such as bill payments, transfer funds, etc. through the art of ICT features such as automatic teller machines, internet or telephone banking services. This paper performs an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing ICT implementation in Iranian banking industry. The survey uses factor analysis to find important factors using a questionnaire consist of 26 variables. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.901, which validates the questionnaire. The survey detects six factors influencing ICT including efficiency approach, new advanced technological achievements, human resource management, service strategy, growth strategy and supporting systems.

Understanding customers’ behavior normally helps planning better marketing strategies, which could lead to an increase in market share and profitability. Loyal customers are always considered as the most important assets for any firm. This paper presents a survey to detect factors influencing the formation of loyal customers’ mental image. The proposed study uses factor analysis to determine these factors by designing a questionnaire and distributing among some loyal customers who do banking business in Bank Melli Iran located in city of Tehran, Iran. The results indicate that there were eight important factors influencing customer loyalty including social status, business identity, brand strength, the contract role, organizational benefit, consumer rights, organizational image and supporting power.

In this paper, we present an empirical study on employees of a private bank to find important factors influencing creative habits. The proposed study of this paper uses Pearson correlation test to detect any meaningful relationship between independent and dependent variables. The results of the study have indicated that sense of being effective is number one priority followed by sense of competence and sense of being meaningful and sense of choice. We have also performed an investigation between employees' personal characteristics and empowering capabilities and the results of our survey have recommended that among different factors including age, gender, educational background and job experience, only age had important effect on empowering employees.

One of the essential functions of human resource management is to take care of skilled employees. The process is normally divided into two categories: first category includes different activities such as having health and safety in working centers, performing healthy and sport programs and some other similar activities to save and improve employees' physical characteristics. The second group includes other important issues normally called benefit packages, which includes good health insurance and retiring plans. Whenever an organization provides good benefit package and supporting programs, there is a better job satisfaction among employee. In this paper, the effects of related services to support employee to reach job satisfaction and employee activities in one of Iranian banks called Mellat bank is investigated using 276 random samples. The results show that employees are relatively satisfied from the benefit package of the bank and they were relatively happy on working for such organization.

This study investigates the quantitative relationship between knowledge based view (i.e. empowering employees, promoting confidence, coding rules) and sustainability competitive advantage (i.e. market, customer, financial) within the banking industry of Iran. A valid research instrument was utilized to conduct a survey of 150 top- and middle-level managers from Mellat bank of Iran. With a response rate of 81.3 percent, 122 questionnaires are returned; the number of valid and usable questionnaires was 101. In order to determine validity of questionnaire, the content validity was used and Cronbach's alpha was used to determine the reliability of the questionnaire (KBV questionnaire 0.886, SCA questionnaire 0.843). Utilizing the structural equation modeling, and after a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, it was found that KBV had the greatest effect on the market centered SCA, while it had the least influence on the customer centered.