The UK Government’s Best Value initiative is intended to ensure that local authorities provide best value in service delivery and emphasises the importance of ensuring a clear customer/citizen focus across all services. Local authorities are already using a variety of methods to capture the voice of the customer, with customer surveys being one of the most popular. Such surveys, however, have tended to focus solely on customers’ perceptions of services and not their expectations. This paper presents the results of using an adapted SERVQUAL approach across a range of Scottish council services. The results of the studies will be discussed, the use of SERVQUAL results by service managers reviewed and the contribution of SERVQUAL to continuous improvement assessed.

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The findings should be useful to nursing staff seeking to assess, and improve, service quality.

Local government in the UK is not immune from the pressures driving successful organizations towards top quality services that delight their customers. Outlines some of the special features of local government service provision and the way in which these might affect the assessment of service quality. Highlights some of the limitations of conventional customer satisfaction surveys which lead the authors to consider the SERVQUAL approach. This method, which has been the subject of considerable academic scrutiny and extensive private sector service application, merits serious consideration by local government managers as a robust, adaptable, diagnostic instrument to measure service quality.

Public sector organisations, such as local authorities, are increasingly under pressure not only to improve their performance but also to be able to demonstrate such improvement through effective performance measurement. An increasing number are turning to the balanced scorecard as a way of responding to such pressures and challenges. This paper examines the attraction of the scorecard to local authorities and uses the authors' experiences with a number of authorities and other public sector organisations to examine the challenges and difficulties of adopting a scorecard approach