In Saudi Arabia, sales force positions have been totally occupied by men until recently. The Saudi Government has taken a number of promising legislative steps to promote women's employment in the retail industry, especially in department stores that specialize in women' goods. Saudi women are now entering such positions, and they need encouragement and support in order to retain their place in the labor market and to reduce their high rate of unemployment. At this early stage of Saudi female employment in the sales force, this study aims to support them by evaluating the level of work motivation and job satisfaction in their workplace. Utilizing the Herzberg model, data was collected from 280 female salespeople. The results show that Saudi female salespeople are not well motivated at work, and they have a low contentment with the working environment. It is therefore recommended that the companies hiring female salespeople take the issue of job satisfaction and work motivation seriously by giving women more responsibilities, ameliorating the conditions of advancement and growth, increasing the number of training programs, and improving the work conditions as well as increasing salaries.

Abstract:The customer satisfaction has been broadly considered as driver of company's success and financial performance in all types of businesses. So, Services' firms have been improving the provided services to meet their customers' expectations which increase customer satisfaction. Thus it is obligatory for those companies to assess continuously the disparity between customers' expectations and perceptions of service quality. This disparity has been studied in many services' organizations including banks in the developed countries and using SERVQUAL. However this type of study has never been investigated in the Arabic banking systems and especially the Saudi one. So the aim of this research is to investigate using SERVQUAL the difference between customers' expectations and perceptions of service quality in the women branches of Saudi banks. After discussing the literature review of service quality, customers' expectations and perceptions, Saudi banking system as well as SERVQUAL model, data were collected from 200 Saudi women branches' customers. The study shows that the level of perceived service quality of Saudi women branches is lower than its customers' expectations of service quality. Essentially the perceived empathy, reliability as well responsiveness of the studied banks are very low and they have the biggest gaps between the customers' expectations and perceptions compared with tangibles and assurance dimensions, . It is therefore recommended to minimize the founded gap that banks improve the perceived service quality by making current operating hours more convenient for customers, giving more personal and individual attention to the customers, enhancing the current capability to understand their specific needs, giving them prompt service in the promised time, solving their problems, as well as telling them when services will be performed.