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Abstract

Under the prevailing hyper competitive environment 'survival of the fittest' has become popular mantra for every business, be it a manufacturer or a service provider.The same is true about the Indian life insurance industry, since opening up, the number of global players in the market has increased and hence the competition.Consequently, only public sector life insurance service provider, Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC)has significantly lost its market share and consumer base to speedily growing private sector companies in last decade.But in the recent years, despite of strong market fundamentals, private sector life insurance companies are struggling hard in maintaining a regular growth of business.In the light of observed facts, presented study made an attempt to identify the level of customer expectation as well as perception of service quality in Indian life insurance industry by using service quality model suggested by Sureshchandar et al. (2001).The findings suggest that there exist a significant negative gap in service quality expected and perceived by the customers of life insurance services.