Modeling customer satisfaction in microfinance sector: A fuzzy Bayesian networks approach

Abstract

Microfinance refers to the provision of financial services like saving, microcredit, and insurance to the poor who have limited access to traditional banking services with the aim of reducing their poverty. However, in the last decade, the literature stresses that the microfinance institutions focus more on their profit rather than the customer. Numerous methods have been used to model customer satisfaction in microfinance. However, a large majority of these methods is unable to take into account complex interactions and dependencies between variables. They may also find difficulties in handling limited and uncertain knowledge. The objective of this article is to model the effect of microfinance-lending process operations on overall customer satisfaction. We managed to develop a fuzzy Bayesian networks model; such an approach is widely required for modeling complex systems characterized by sparse or uncertain information as well as for conducting the cause and effect analysis.