Serving the Local Community Customers: Evidence from Multi-Cultural Malaysia
Year: 2012
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationships among service quality, trust, communication effectiveness, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in public service delivery. This paper hopes to understand the service quality in service delivery of a government department (i.e., District Office). The survey research addresses key relationships among service quality dimensions, trust, communication effectiveness customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in the public services. Structured questionnaire was designed and used to collect data from the customers. A total of 200 respondents, reflecting normal distribution based on the population and demographic factors were randomly selected. Respondents were queried on their knowledge and preference level of the service delivered by the District Office. The findings indicate that responsiveness, reliability and empathy are among the important dimensions of the service quality that will influence the customer satisfaction and loyalty. Empathy is significantly and positively related with customer satisfaction, communication effectiveness, trust and customer loyalty.Keywords: Service quality, Communication effectiveness, Trust, District Office, Malaysia.1. INTRODUCTIONSince Malaysia gained her independence from the British in 1957, the public sector service quality has been an integral part of the government's development and advancement agenda. The concern for quality has been recognized both in the context of changing expectation of customers (Kueh and Voon, 2007) as well as facing the challenges brought about by globalization. While acknowledging the importance of delivering quality service, it becomes even more challenging to define it precisely and to satisfy customers from diverse backgrounds, particularly in multicultural nations such Malaysia. Values such as efficiency and effectiveness, equity, equality, ethics, democracy and accountability may influence the nature of quality (i.e., expectations and perceptions).In the public sector, one of the key concerns is delivering quality services especially the customer-contact counter staff. As front-liners, the quality of services provided by the public service staffwill have a tremendous influence on the public's perceptions of the quality of the public service. Quality service delivery is considered as one of the most important research topics in the context of human resource development due to its close associations with customer satisfaction and loyalty (Zeithaml et al., 1996; Qin and Prybutok, 2008; Voon, 2006). Among the commonly cited reasons attributed to poor service are staff's lack of knowledge and skills, inadequate service operation system, and inflated customers' expectation (e.g. Parasuraman et al., 1988). Government departments generally have a large number of customers. Hence, it is difficult for them to provide services that please everyone. The situation becomes even more complex due to insufficient resources or when there are other operational obstacles present. With this in mind, the government has been trying to improve the delivery of services from time to time in accordance with customers' expectation.The local community customers have increasing expectations of the public service in terms of administration, management and development of the district. For instance, the people have higher level of expectations from the District Office staffin terms of their ability to resolve administrative matters as well as to be knowledgeable with the local customs and culture. Knowledge of these matters is of paramount importance at all levels of a District Office in order to meet the desires and expectations of the local customers. Among the key roles of the District Office are: 1) to supervise, provide and implement efficient and effective customer administrative services, and 2) to plan, monitor, implement and achieve a sustainable and balanced socio-economic development standard in the Division. …
Institutions: Universiti Teknologi MARA System, Universiti Teknologi MARA
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W792372223