Service Quality Components and Group Criteria in Local Government

Uses exploratory factor analysis to investigate the dimensions of service which consumers of local government services use as a basis for their judgement of service quality: 30 customers of such a local government authority were surveyed. The six factors identified were cluster analysed to see whether or not the survey population represented groups of people who ascribed different levels of importance to the service quality dimensions. This was found to be true. Other demographic groupings of respondents were also investigated for such differences in importance using analysis of variance. People with different income levels and different ethnic backgrounds were found to attribute different levels of importance to some of the dimensions which had been identified. The results suggest that local government authorities need to take into account strategic dimensions and sectoral views of dimensional importances if they are to maximize their customer perceived service quality performance.