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- Title
Citizen ratings of public and private service quality: A comparative perspective.
- Authors
Poister, Theodore H.; Henry, Gary T.
- Abstract
The article focuses on the public's assessment of the quality of services, provided by public sector and private sector establishments. It often appears that the perceived performance gap between the public and private sectors pertains to both quality and customer service as well as the efficiency of service delivery. The enthusiasm for local government citizen surveys as an evaluative tool, however, has not been without controversy. An influential critic, Brian Stipak, argued that responses to very general satisfaction items in citizen surveys often do not correlate with more direct, objective measures of service delivery and warned against interpreting such subjective data as indicators of program performance. Mangers in both sectors have begun to get the message that quality and customer satisfaction are important. Currently, many public administrators are experiencing with a variety of strategies to strengthen quality and customer service. It is hoped that future replications and extensions of the research reported here will help to move this agenda along and offer a way to tie quality improvement efforts to methods of assessing quality and customer satisfaction.
- Subjects
GEORGIA; UNITED States; SOCIAL services; CUSTOMER services; QUALITY of service; CUSTOMER satisfaction; PUBLIC sector; PRIVATE sector; SURVEYS
- Publication
Public Administration Review, 1994, Vol 54, Issue 2, p155
- ISSN
0033-3352
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/976524