The Case For The Inexperienced User

Abstract

Most citizen satisfaction surveys use filter questions to limit satisfaction responses to only those citizens with direct, personal experience with the service. The resulting small response set is inherently problematic, but no more so than the loss of valuable data on the expectations of service satisfaction from citizens who do not use the service. Borrowing a theoretical framework from the consumer satisfaction literature, this article identifies differences in the mean service satisfaction between inexperienced and experienced users of four common local government services (police, fire, emergency medical, and parks). The authors conclude that both experienced and inexperienced users have important information about service quality for local policy makers, especially when the satisfaction results can be disaggregated by neighborhood. Recommendations for modifying common citizen survey practice follow from the findings.

Coercion versus Choice: Citizen Evaluations of Public Service Quality across Methods of Consumption

“…Alternatively, do unresponsive and impolite frontline employees make captives even angrier about their lack of free will? Research needs to better determine how the direct service experience influences evaluations of service quality (Kelly and Swindell 2003).…”

What Causes Satisfaction? A Multiyear Analysis of Armenian Local Communities

“…Another notable issue is citizens' satisfaction with specific services versus their overall satisfaction. A number of studies have been carried out in this domain, demonstrating that most service users (no matter how often they use a particular service) have some opinion about public service quality (Van de Walle, 2009) and, while the evaluation of specific services might be drastically different from overall (dis)satisfaction (Kelly & Swindell, 2003), it is also, once again, hard to tie objective quality with satisfaction (Van Ryzin, Expectations, Performance and Citizen Satisfaction with Urban Services, 2004) or, at least, not all aspects of service quality have a similar impact on user satisfaction (Mbassi, Mbarga, & Ndem, 2019). Some scholars have also noted that general opinions about government performance often predispose opinions about specific institutions and services (Van de Walle, Kampen, & Bouckaert, 2005).…”