Quality assessment of public services in Latvia

Abstract

At present, the service sector receives growing attention taking into account its role in the socio-economic development of the society. Public services produced to meet the demands of the population occupy a special place in this sphere. Improving the quality of public services is one of the essential goals in improving the functioning of public administration in Latvia and globally. The research aimed to assess the customer service quality of administrative services provided by Latvia's public administration institutions, performing the factor and cluster analysis of the collected data. Research base: Public administration institutions (6) and their branches (17) in Latvia. The research participants are two hundred ninety-two occasionally selected customers of public administration institutions who filled in SERVQUAL questionnaires before and after their visit to an institution. The sample of customers is occasional and administratively territorial, observing the proportional representation of planning regions. The service quality assessment modelthe SERVQUAL instrument (Parasuraman et al., 1988), was used for the data collection. The analysis of the research data factors and clusters was carried out. Service provision quality in all quality dimensions has been given a negative evaluation. The economic efficiency of the largest state institutions understudy is low, and so is the quality of provided services as evaluated by their customers.