Evaluating Turkish Banks’ Complaint Management Performance Using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Digitalization increased the number of transactions made by individual customers in the banking market because of the ease of access and use of digital banking systems. Also, the proliferation of e-commerce applications triggered this increase—consequently, the number of service failures and customer complaints also increased. Today, bank consumers can raise their voices quickly through online complaint platforms. By analyzing a dataset taken from one of these platforms ( sikayetvar.com ), this study aimed to evaluate the performance of 19 banks that are operating in Turkey in terms of customer complaint management. In the first phase, the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is used to analyze data provided by seven experts who were asked to make pairwise comparisons to weigh the evaluation criteria. Following this, the weights obtained by FAHP were used in the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) to evaluate banks based on the following criteria: satisfaction score, solved complaint rate, complaint response rate, and complaint rate. Finally, to test the sensitivity of the results obtained with TOPSIS, the resolution is applied with the ARAS (Additive Ratio Assessment System), COPRAS (Complex Proportional Assessment), WASPAS (Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment), MABAC (Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison), and GRA (Gray Relation Analysis) methods. Findings illustrated that the most important criterion was satisfaction score. Solved complaint rate, complaint response rate, and complaint rate followed this criterion. The criteria weights were used in TOPSIS, and the bank with the best complaint management performance was found as Odea Bank (private and foreign bank). This bank was followed by HSBC (private and foreign bank), QNB (private and foreign bank), and Albaraka (participation and foreign bank) banks, respectively. Overall, it is found that private banks performed better than public and participation banks in terms of complaint management. The procedure that followed during the analysis exemplified how banks can benefit from third-party complaint datasets in benchmarking. The literature lacks studies investigating customer satisfaction through complaint management criteria derived from a real dataset; accordingly, the current study attempts to inspire further investigations in this context.