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Public service quality and customer

satisfaction: exploring the attributes of
service quality in the public sector
a b
Seung-Kyu Rhee & June-Young Rha
a
Graduate School of Management, Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology (KAIST) 207-43 , Cheonryangri 2-dong,
Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, 130722, Republic of Korea
b
Department of Business Administration , The Catholic University
of Korea , 43-1, Yeokgok 2-dng, Wonmi-gu, Bucheon, Gyeonggi-do
420743, Republic of Korea
Published online: 28 Oct 2009.
To cite this article: Seung-Kyu Rhee & June-Young Rha (2009) Public service quality and customer
satisfaction: exploring the attributes of service quality in the public sector, The Service Industries
Journal, 29:11, 1491-1512, DOI: 10.1080/02642060902793441
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Vol. 29, No. 11, November 2009, 1491–1512
Public service quality and customer satisfaction: exploring

the attributes of service quality in the public sector
Seung-Kyu Rheea and June-Young Rhab
a
Graduate School of Management, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
207-43, Cheonryangri 2-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130722, Republic of Korea; bDepartment of
Business Administration, The Catholic University of Korea, 43-1, Yeokgok 2-dng, Wonmi-gu,
Bucheon Gyeonggi-do 420743, Republic of Korea
(Received 14 May 2007; final version received 18 June 2007)
Beyond the existing SERVQUAL-based research, the authors develop an alternative

model of public service quality. The various sources of public service quality are
explored and a new classification scheme formulated by using critical incidents
technique. Four main qualities of public service are identified: process quality,
outcome quality, design quality, and relationship quality. The findings suggest that the
critical attributes of public service quality for customer satisfaction differ according to
the types of customers in the public sector. Final customers (beneficiaries) give
priority to the process and outcome qualities, whereas intermediary customers (social
workers) have high regard for the design and relationship qualities.
Keywords: public service quality; CIT; design quality; process quality; outcome
quality; relationship quality; satisfiers; dissatisfiers
Introduction
Since the 1990s, service quality and customer satisfaction have been recognised as a criti-
cal strategic imperative for reinventing the public sector. In literature, however, most
researchers have directly applied five SERVQUAL quality attributes to measure public
service quality without exploring or validating the quality attributes in the public sector
(Bigné, Moliner, & Sánchez, 2003; Brysland & Curry, 2001; Donnelly, Wisniewski, &
Dalrymple, 1995; Wisniewski, 2001). SERVQUAL is a well-known quality model that
has been used to measure process quality in the private services, where human encounters
are important for delivering a satisfactory service to customers (Dabholkar & Overby,
2005; Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1988; Powpaka, 1996). Only a few studies deal
with other measures such as equity and feedback, which are especially important in
public services (Park, 2001; Ra & Park, 2001).
Given that the sources of quality in public services differ from those of private services,
attention must be paid to the multiplicity and complexity of issues in identifying the cus-
tomers of public services. Besides beneficiaries, the customers of public services comprise
diverse stakeholders such as employees, taxpayers, communities, non-governmental organ-
isations (NGOs) and non-profit organisations (NPOs), and the press (Andreasen & Kotler,
1996). Externality problems between beneficiaries and taxpayers can also be a matter of
grave concern. Conflicts of interest among beneficiaries and stakeholders are inevitable
in public services. Each party has its own interests not only in the human encounter

Corresponding author. Email: jyrha@catholic.ac.kr
ISSN 0264-2069 print/ISSN 1743-9507 online

# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/02642060902793441
http://www.informaworld.com
1492 S. Rhee and J. Rha
process, but also in the process of policymaking and service design. This is because the
service standards, which specify who would be stakeholders and what stakes would be
affected, are determined in the process of policymaking and service design. Besides,
many NGO/NPOs participate in the delivery process of public services as agencies of gov-
ernments. As a result, various relational patterns are emerging between governments and
civil organisations; and the ability of governments to manage these relations is critical to
improving quality and customer satisfaction in the public sector. Likewise, the sources of
quality cannot be limited to service encounters and should be extended to both the design
stage of public services and relationship with organisations that help deliver public ser-
vices. In spite of the obvious differences of public services, the existing SERVQUAL-
based studies on public service quality have ignored them.
The goal of this study is to suggest a grounded model of public service quality that
could provide researchers and practitioners in the public sector with a foundation for a
more systematic investigation and implementation. To achieve this goal, we used the criti-
cal incident technique (CIT) to explore the various sources of public service quality that
lead to customer satisfaction. Then we identify the attributes of public service quality
and formulate a suitable classification scheme.
In sum, we identified four main quality dimensions of public service: design quality,
process quality, outcome quality, and relationship quality. We also found that the critical
attributes of public service quality for customer satisfaction differ according to the types of
customers in the public sector. Intermediary customers, such as the employees of service
agencies, emphasise design and the relationship quality of services provided by the
government. However, final customers, the beneficiaries of public services, lay greater
importance on the process and outcome quality of the services received.
This article is structured as follows. First, we present a description of the CIT and data
collection procedures as research methods. Second, we introduce a classification scheme
of the surveyed incidents and analyse whether the critical dimensions of service quality
differ for final customers and intermediary customers. Third, we review the detailed attri-
butes of public service quality and analyse which service quality attributes are satisfiers or
dissatisfiers. Finally, we conclude with thoughts on how to improve this study and achieve
more generality.
Research methods
Critical incident technique
The CIT developed by Flanagan (1954) is an explorative methodology for inductively dis-
covering theoretically significant variables from the critical incidents and episodes that
respondents have experienced. Unlike quantitative classification methods, such as factor
analysis, cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling, the CIT uses the qualitative
content analyses of respondents’ descriptive answers to open-ended questions. The CIT
reputedly demonstrates strong reliability and validity if the procedures follow the rigorous
guidelines of theory building (Keaveney, 1995; Ronan & Lathan, 1974). Researchers have
extensively used the CIT in diverse disciplines of social science (Keatinge, 2002), as well
as in the analysis of the factors that affect customer satisfaction and service quality in the
services marketing field (Arnold, Reynolds, Ponder, & Lueg, 2005; Bejou, Edvardsson, &
Rakowski, 1996; Bitner, Booms, & Mohr, 1994; Bitner, Booms, & Tetreault, 1990;
Chung-Herra, Goldschmidt, & Hoffman, 2004; Edvardsson, 1992; Hoffman & Chung,
1999; Keaveney, 1995; Wong & Sohal, 2003). Moreover, the CIT is very useful to
discover unknown and unanticipated variables. To explore the dimensions of public
The Service Industries Journal 1493
service quality, we used the CIT to analyse critical incidents that either left customers sat-
isfied or dissatisfied; and based on our analysis, we formulate a base model of public
service quality.
Scope of the survey

Social welfare service
In modern welfare states, public services have evolved from regulation and basic security
services to more advanced services, such as individualised social welfare services, and the
evolution has increased the people’s quality of life. Individualised welfare services, which
are closer to the daily lives of their citizens, are mainly provided by local governments.
Hence, the issue of quality management in the public sector mainly occurs in local govern-
ment services.
Local governments provide three types of services: social welfare services, social uti-
lities services, and industrial and economic services (Chung, 2001). The types of services
that become generally the subject of quality research are the social welfare services (e.g.
social safety networks, labour, childcare, and healthcare) and the social utilities services
(transportation, housing, education, water, and sewage). The industrial and economic ser-
vices are generally considered to be beyond the scope of service quality research because
those services primarily involve the making of policies and regulations rather than trans-
actions or exchanges of service.
The social welfare service is an ideal public service to explore the public service
quality problem. The distinctive characteristics of public service, such as free rider and
externality problems, often occur in social welfare services. Furthermore, the character-
istics of equity and efficiency, which are known to have trade-off relationship difficult
to reconcile, should be improved simultaneously in social welfare services. This is
because the improved efficiency and equity could lead to better customer satisfaction in
different ways. Moreover, a social welfare service is a multilateral collaborative service
in which diverse institutions play important roles in delivering the service. In this
article, we collected data only from social welfare services.
Final customers and intermediary customers

The CIT investigation covers the final customers who receive the public service, as well as
the employees of the agency responsible for actual delivery of the service. From the
‘service profit chain’ viewpoint suggested by Heskett, Jones, and Lovenman (1994), the
employees of the agency could be considered as ‘internal customers’. As these employees
are not usually the public servants, but public service agents, we refer to them as inter-
mediary customers of the services provided by the governments. They have motivations
to engage in the service provision that differ structurally from that of public servants,
who are the primary internal customers of the government in the service value chain.
Hence, the quality attributes and the importance of the viewpoint of intermediary custo-
mers might be different from those of internal and external customers of the public service.
The service delivery model of Figure 1, which flows from governments to agencies to citi-
zens, represents the generic structure of public service delivery under current study. Rather
than perform services directly, governments tend to delegate them to non-governmental
agencies, whether profit or non-profit. However, governments remain accountable for
the supply of public services. Thus, governments must pay keen attention to the quality
problems that occur in the total value chain of public service. To address the issues of
Figure 1. Service delivery chain and customers in public service.
quality management, governments must distinguish final customers from intermediary

customers in the different stages of the service value chain and establish their own
service quality dimensions. Hence, for this CIT study of the social welfare services, we
included both beneficiaries and social workers as customers.
Data collection
Critical incidents could be gathered by using the various data collection methods such as
personal or focus group interviews, direct or participatory observation, and open-ended
questionnaires (Wong & Sohal, 2003). We chose a mail survey with open-ended question-
naires as our means of collecting data on critical incidents (Johnston, 1995; Wong &
Sohal, 2003). The advantage of this method is that it enables researchers to collect descrip-
tions of the incidents in the respondents’ own words; the disadvantage, however, is that
respondents may not take sufficient time to describe their experience clearly (Wong &
Sohal, 2003). To overcome this disadvantage, we excluded from the data set any
answers that were too simple to be termed as incidents. According to Bitner et al.
(1990), an incident for service quality research is required to meet the following four
criteria: (1) involving employee – customer interaction, (2) being very satisfying or dissa-
tisfying from the customer’s point of view, (3) being a discrete episode, and (4) being
described in sufficient detail to be visualised by the interviewer. We loosely applied
these four criteria to judge the adequacy of the incident data because we asked respondents
to describe their experience of a public policy or service. A fair amount of data was unre-
lated to employee – customer interactions but represented a preference or critique regard-
ing a specific public policy or service. We acknowledged that a description met the criteria
of an incident when the description expressed a clearly perceived sense of satisfaction or
dissatisfaction.
The questionnaires were distributed to beneficiaries and social workers at local social
welfare centres. We asked the respondents to report their specific events or experiences,
and they were allowed to describe multiple incidents (Johnson, 2002). The following ques-
tions were used to elicit the critical incidents:
. For beneficiaries: Describe in detail the most satisfying (dissatisfying) incident in
your experience of any social welfare service provided by the government, a
social welfare centre, or a social worker.
. For social workers: Describe in detail the most satisfying (dissatisfying) incident in
your experience of any social welfare policy or service provided by the government.
The questionnaires were mailed to 373 social welfare centres in all the local wards of
the Republic of Korea with a paid reply envelope. Seventy centres sent the reply mail and
we collated 631 critical incidents from 321 beneficiary customers and 497 incidents from
261 social workers. Fifty-four incidents of the beneficiaries and 13 incidents of the social
workers failed to meet the criteria, leaving a total of 577 and 484 usable incidents from the
beneficiaries and the social workers, respectively. A total in the range of 200 and 300 criti-
cal incidents is generally sufficient for CIT research (Friman & Edvardsson, 2003).
Data analysis
The analysis of CIT data is an inductive classification and conceptualisation process. After
reading all the incidents, we grouped the similar ones into various categories. We repeated
our reading and categorisation of the incidents many times. We modified, divided, and
recombined categories until reliable conceptual patterns emerged from the data. When
mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories emerged through the repetitive process,
we named the categories in service quality terms.
Two judges who were trained in the management discipline developed the incident
classification scheme independently of each other; and then they compared their classifi-
cation schemes and resolved disagreements through discussion (Edvardsson, 1992; Grove
& Fisk, 1997). Through this process, we gradually established the final classification
scheme. After the two judges consented to the final classification scheme, they indepen-
dently sorted all the incidents into the various categories of the scheme. Next, the two
judges compared their results and calculated the inter-judge reliability score. The score
was 88.9% and 90.5% for satisfactory and dissatisfactory incidents, respectively. When
the inter-judge reliability score exceeded 80% (Keaveney, 1995), they resolved disagree-
ments through discussion and then established the final frequency tables of the service
quality classification.
Results: a model of public service quality

We conducted this empirical study to find new quality variables and develop a conceptual
model of service quality that could be applied to quality management in the public sector.
The CIT classification scheme and its categories, which are shown in Table 1, provide a
base model of public service quality.
In this section, we define and explain the categories in the conceptual terms of the
service quality literature. We limit our discussion to the development of service quality
attributes, and we also omit any direct references to detailed statements of the critical inci-
dents (Chung-Herra et al., 2004; Friman & Edvardsson, 2003; Johnston, 1995). Table 1
also shows the frequencies in each category.
Classification scheme and frequency pattern

We classified the critical incidents surveyed in this study into four dimensions: design
quality, process quality, outcome quality, and relationship quality. The classification cri-
terion is which stage in the service value chain is the source of service quality that leads to
the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of customers. Design quality refers to how well a public
policy or service is developed at policymaking or service design stages. Process quality
refers to how customers perceive quality during a service process (Grönroos, 2000).
Outcome quality refers to how customers perceive the quality of what is left with after
a service process is finished (Grönroos, 2000). Relationship quality refers to how are
the depth and climate of the relationship between parties in the service delivery
process. This classification scheme reflects a process management view that is integrated
with the Nordic view of service marketing research. The latter emphasises the distinction
1496
Table 1. Classification scheme and frequency of critical incidents.

Final customers Intermediary customers
Category Definition Satisfactory Dissatisfactory Satisfactory Dissatisfactory
Design quality The quality that customers have experienced or perceived in relation to the 28 63 147
policymaking and service designing
Policy design Superiority of policy contents: strategic adequacy of policy and tactical 43 37
S. Rhee and J. Rha

substantiality of policy measures
Policy Appropriateness of the principles of policy operation: the consistency, 17 44
implementation flexibility, and equity with which principles are applied to policy
execution
Resourcefulness Sufficiency of resources: the extent to which the physical and human 11 20 66
resources required to provide a public service are sufficient, and the
efficiency of resource allocation
Process quality The quality that customers have experienced or perceived in relation to the 197 132 14 61
service process or human encounter
SERVQUAL
Tangibles Representing the service physically: appearance of physical facilities, 13 44
equipment, personnel, and written materials (Zeithaml et al., 2006)
Reliability Delivering on promises: ability to perform the promised service dependably 20 1 9
and accurately (Zeithaml et al., 2006)
Responsiveness Being willing to help: willingness to help customers and provide prompt 8 20 3 11
service (Zeithaml et al., 2006)
Assurance Inspiring trust and confidence: employees’ knowledge and courtesy and 54 16 2 37
their ability to inspire trust and confidence (Zeithaml et al., 2006)
Empathy Treating customers as individuals: caring, individualised attention given to 108 16 8 1
customers (Zeithaml et al., 2006)
Publicness Public nature of a service process: procedural justice and the participation 14 10 3
of the general public in a service process
Interference Problem customers: emotional effect of problematic behaviour of 6
neighbour customers
Outcome quality The quality that customers have experienced or perceived in relation to the 210 10
service outcome and the personal or social consequence of a service that
has been provided
Valence Goodness or badness of a service outcome 83 3
Material gain Goodness or badness of the tangible benefits of a service 73 7
Quality of life Qualitative change in living conditions: change in health, living 54

environment, economic and labour status, and learning opportunity of
individuals
Relationship The quality that the employees of organisations participating in the delivery 52 147
quality process of a public service have experienced or perceived in relation to
their relationship with the government
Cooperation Collaboration with partners: communication, joint decision-making, joint 47 34
activities, and supporting and empowering collaborators
Coordination Coordination and linking of relationships among partner agencies: 5 22
identifying distinctive roles and functions, integrating their services, and
mediating conflict between agencies
Atmosphere Overall atmosphere surrounding relationships: status of conflict, closeness, 91
friendliness, bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and red tape
Total 407 170 129 355
1497
between process quality and outcome quality (Brady & Cronin, 2001). The process
management view focuses mainly on a value creation process in which business values
are defined, developed, and delivered. The value creation process comprises a design
process and a delivery process. This view is the general way of thinking in the fields of
operations management and services marketing.
We define quality in terms of the experience or perception of customers. In the absence
of the actual experience of a service, the quality of that service can still be perceived
through reputation or word of mouth; customer satisfaction, on the other hand, pertains
only to an actual experience (Zeithaml, Bitner, & Gremler, 2006).
Table 1 shows that, for beneficiaries, the frequency of the satisfactory incidents
exceeded that of the dissatisfactory incidents. For social workers, the results were
reverse. The CIT results show that the beneficiaries used more assertive expressions for
satisfying incidents than for dissatisfying incidents, and again, the results were reverse
for social workers.

We can explain and interpret the CIT results in terms of the disconfirmation theory,
which suggests that the perception of quality results from a comparison of the experienced
performance with the expected performance (Grönroos, 1984). Beneficiaries tend to have a
lower expectation of the service because social welfare services are mostly free. Especially
in developing countries such as Korea, people have less experience of free public services,
and hence feel less entitled to high quality services. The low expectation of beneficiaries
leads to the asymmetric frequency of satisfactory incidents and dissatisfactory incidents.
The results of our survey coincide with the argument that lower socio-economic groups
and minority groups are more likely to say they are satisfied with public services,
whereas higher socio-economic groups are more likely to complain about poor public ser-
vices (Gaster & Squire, 2003). Social workers tend to have higher expectations for social
welfare services because they have a sense of social responsibility and professionalism.
Furthermore, the weak social welfare system in developing countries seems to make
social workers become more critical or cynical about government services.
Table 1 shows that the beneficiaries (final customers) lay much importance on process
quality and outcome quality, whereas the social workers (intermediary customers) looked
more for design quality and relationship quality. This discrepancy comes from the differ-
ence of contents exchanged in the service process. Final customers directly receive the
core benefits of a public service. They mainly experience the encounter process and the
final outcome of the public service. Hence, they are naturally sensitive to the process
quality during a service encounter and give priority to the outcome quality.
In contrast, intermediary customers receive no direct benefit from the public service
but act as agents in providing the service to final customers. Intermediary customers
receive necessary resources from the government and have obligations to respond to gov-
ernment requests such as data gathering, surveys, directives, evaluation, and audits. The
interactions between the intermediary customers and governments are not usually trans-
action-based services, on which process quality is based; rather they are social
exchange-based relationships, which are long term and structural in nature. Therefore,
the task of improving only the process quality of public servants in a human encounter
is not enough to satisfy intermediary customers. The more critical factor is that the gov-
ernment goes into a good partnership with service agencies. The CIT results for social
workers show that the frequency of incidents concerned with the relationship quality is
nearly three times greater than that of the process quality.
Furthermore, as specialists of social welfare services, the intermediary customers tend
to have strong opinions on whether the design process of a government policy service is
effective. This is because the policy design process of governments determines the scope
and contents of their work, and the quality of their working life depends on it.
Process quality
In earlier research, the dimensions of service quality were classified as a technical quality
and a functional quality (Grönroos, 1982, 1984). The technical quality, which represents
customer perceptions of service outcomes, is concerned with what the customer actually
receives from a service provider. The functional quality, which implies process quality, is
concerned with how the service outcomes are delivered. The prevalent SERVQUAL
model mainly deals with process quality (Dabholkar & Overby, 2005; Powpaka, 1996;
Richard & Allway, 1993). The original SERVQUAL measures came from the empirical
studies pertaining to four industries: the repair and maintenance of appliances, retail
banking, long-distance telephony, and credit cards, which are all high-contact human
services (Parasuraman et al., 1988). We found all five SERVQUAL quality dimensions
in our study, and other categories such as publicness and interference emerged within
process quality.
SERVQUAL-equivalent categories
The incidents classified into the five SERVQUAL categories almost perfectly correspond
to the SERVQUAL measurement items. However, within the empathy category, we came
across two types of incidents that have not been found in the SERVQUAL items: (1) the
beneficiaries had a sense of solidarity by communicating with companions and service
crews and (2) the beneficiaries were impressed with the voluntary and sacrificing commit-
ment of service crews to the service activity. The context of the social welfare services can
be helpful in understanding the new dimensions. The beneficiaries of a social welfare
service tend to feel alone and alienated because they are often isolated from personal or
social relations in their daily lives. When they begin to participate in a social service pro-
gramme and start building personal relationships with their neighbours, colleagues, volun-
teers, and social workers, they enjoy being with other people and feel a sense of solidarity.
Moreover, the social welfare service is often provided free of charge to the beneficiaries,
and many volunteers work without financial reward. The beneficiaries could be impressed
by the sacrifice and devotion of volunteers and social workers.
The empathy incidents in Table 1 constitute a relatively major proportion (68.9%) of
the beneficiaries’ satisfactory incidents as classified under the process quality dimension.
This proportion is consistent with the results of existing research on private services,
which indicates that empathy is a vantage delighter (Johnston, 1995). In addition, an exam-
ination of incidents concerning timeliness, conformance, and service availability within
the reliability category, as well as adaptability and promptness within the responsiveness
category, shows a preponderance of dissatisfactory incidents over satisfactory incidents
for both beneficiaries and social workers. These results reflect the possibility that the
enhanced quality of private services in Korea may have escalated the general level of
expectations in the society for individual attention and hospitality. On the other hand,
the high proportion of dissatisfactory incidents that were classified under the atmosphere
category may imply that agencies and intermediary customers have a worse perception
regarding the quality of public services than individual customers do.
A number of dissatisfactory incidents concerning tangibles were found because the
beneficiaries whom we surveyed frequently used the facilities of social welfare centres.
Furthermore, the incidents that referred to the non-professionalism of public servants in

charge of social welfare policies and services constitute a major proportion of dissatisfac-
tory incidents under the assurance category.
Other categories
The publicness category, discussed in some studies on public service quality, is also found
in our CIT results (Park, 2001; Ra & Park, 2001). This category includes incidents related
to fairness of the service process and the participation of customers. When complaining
about the lack of fairness, the beneficiaries said that the decisions on who was entitled
to be a beneficiary and how much were made without objective criteria. This lack of objec-
tive criteria led to unfair distribution of resources. The participation incidents showed that
beneficiaries took pleasure in participating as helping hands in the delivery process of
service. These indicate that the beneficiaries occasionally participate as recipients as

well as providers for other beneficiaries in the service process. This distinctive character-
istic of public services, which cannot be found in private services, shows that the benefi-
ciaries of public service have the characteristics of citizens as well as consumers.
The interference category shows that the behaviour of fellow customers affect a cus-
tomer’s perception. The disruptive words and deeds of a fellow customer or the ambience
of a majority of customers can strain the service encounter and then lead to overall custo-
mer satisfaction or dissatisfaction (Bitner et al., 1994; Grove & Fisk, 1997). This case
occurs when a number of people simultaneously share the same physical space or facility
in order to receive the service, regardless of whether the service is public or not.
The participation-related incidents in the publicness category were all satisfactory
incidents. In the participation incidents, the customers apparently took pleasure in partici-
pating as volunteers or paid helpers. In the private sector, the participation of customers in
the service industry does not appear to be a determinant of customer satisfaction. All the
incidents pertaining to fairness were described as dissatisfactory incidents. This result
implies that fairness is a pure hygiene factor to customer satisfaction, although the existing
literature on public service quality (Park, 2001; Ra & Park, 2001) suggests fairness as a
service quality attribute. The interference incidents showed the same frequency pattern
as the fairness incidents. Interference is also a hygiene factor.
Outcome quality
The terminological definition of outcome quality was well established in the 1980s
(Grönroos, 2000), and there is a consensus in the literature that outcome quality signifi-
cantly affects customer satisfaction (Brady & Cronin, 2001; Dabholkar & Overby,
2005; Hui, Zhao, Fan, & Au, 2004; Powpaka, 1996). To our knowledge, however, the
attributes that comprise outcome quality have not yet been clearly identified in the litera-
ture. Grönroos (1982) simply stated that outcome quality is what the customer is left with
after a service has been delivered, the actual meaning of which depends on the service.
Specifically, in healthcare services outcome quality might refer to a health improvement,
whereas in Internet services it might refer to the traffic amount and the contents. These
outcome quality attributes are too technical and service-specific to be generalised into
common terms. Furthermore, only a few researchers have attempted to clarify the attributes
of outcome quality (Brady & Cronin, 2001; Powpaka, 1996; Wong & Sohal, 2003). Brady
and Cronin (2001) identified waiting time, tangibles, and valence as the attributes of
outcome quality and then suggested a hierarchical service quality model.
From among the outcome quality attributes, three categories emerged from our CIT
results: valence, material gain, and quality of life.
Valence
Valence is defined as whether customers believe the service outcome is good or bad,
regardless of their evaluation of any other aspect of the experience (Brady & Cronin,
2001). Although valence appears to be similar to the concept of customer satisfaction,
the two concepts are fundamentally different in their underlying cause. Customer satisfac-
tion is a more inclusive concept than valence. Whereas valence is a focused evaluation that
reflects the perception of service quality, customer satisfaction is attributed to the percep-
tion of service quality as well as various variables such as price, product quality, personal
factors, and situational factors (Zeithaml et al., 2006). In other words, a high valence value
does not always ensure a high level of customer satisfaction and a low valence value does
not necessarily lead to a low level of customer satisfaction.
Material gains
The material gains category reflects various types of tangible benefits such as cash, non-
cash (in kind), and physical services. Zeithaml et al. (2006) identified the product quality
as another separate determinant of service satisfaction. In about 50 incidents categorised as
valence or material gains, respondents additionally mentioned that they appreciated the
service because it was free or inexpensive. This appreciation explains why half of the sat-
isfactory incidents were related to outcome quality.
Quality of life
Improving the quality of life can be seen as the ultimate objective of public policy and
public services. However, there has not yet been a theoretical consensus on the composite
variables of quality of life, though its multidimensionality has been agreed upon (Reicken
& Yavas, 2001). Social psychologists emphasise the affective and cognitive components.
Economists or sociologists focus on the social and environmental indicators such as
income, education, housing, and healthcare.
The CIT results show two alternative perspectives of quality of life. Critical incidents
pertaining to living conditions, learning environments, health, the opportunity to work or
to learn, and the right to live represent the environmental aspect of life. Incidents that
pertain to improving family relations and solving affective problems are related to the
psychological aspect of life. These CIT results might be due to the distinctiveness of
the social welfare services, which commonly deal with people in the minimum level
of living conditions. It may be going too far to disaggregate quality of life into detailed
attributes. The quality of life attributes are too service-specific to be classified in detail.
Besides the three categories of outcome quality, we expected to find other categories
such as the effectiveness of the service or the attainment of a service goal from the service
provider’s perspective. However, these categories were not evident in the CIT results
because the CIT survey was limited to the incidents of customers.
In a review of incidents concerning outcome quality, we found that over half of the
satisfactory incidents were related to basic welfare services. This differs from the results
of existing research on the public service quality in advanced welfare states. According
to Schedler and Felix (2000), the basic welfare service is a hygiene qualifier to customer
satisfaction because the basic human right to live is a fundamental and constitutional right
in modern democratic societies. However, our CIT result shows that, in developing or
underdeveloped countries where the social welfare services are relatively weak, the basic
welfare services can be a vantage delighter. This argument provides a new window of
opportunity for improving the public services in developing or underdeveloped countries.
Higher efficiency in public services can boost customer satisfaction because it can help
broaden the beneficiary pool and generate more services under budget constraints.
Surely, when the social welfare system is fully developed, the public will take basic
welfare services for granted, and their expectations of the service will get higher.
Relationship quality
With the growing interest in relationship marketing, relationship quality has emerged as a
new research theme for the study of service quality (Bennet & Barkensjo, 2005; Crosby,
Evans, & Cowles, 1990; Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, & Gremler, 2002; Naudé & Buttle,
2000; Rosen & Surprenant, 1998; Smith, 1998; Storbacka, Strandvik, & Grönroos,
1994). The literature on relationship quality has focused on examining the attributes of
long-term relational exchange processes between service providers and customers,
while SERVQUAL-based research has mainly dealt with the short-term transactions of
service encounters (Bennet & Barkensjo, 2005; Lin & Ding, 2005; Roberts, Varki, &
Brodie, 2003; Shamdasani & Balakrishnan, 2000; Storbacka et al., 1994). These studies
used affective variables such as trust, commitment, and satisfaction to measure relation-
ship quality.
The relationship quality incidents that emerged in our CIT survey pertain to inter-organ-
isational relationship between social welfare centres and the government. This type of
relationship differs from consumer relationships in terms of complexity and uncertainty.
While consumer relationships mainly involve communication with service providers,
inter-organisational relationships cover a variety of exchanges, such as information,
resources, capabilities, functions, and authorities. Inter-organisational relationships also
address relational mechanisms such as collaboration, coordination, and communication.
This relational complexity necessarily generates high uncertainty in the social exchange
process between organisations. Therefore, the constructs of relationship quality should
be composed of variables that differ from those of consumer relationships. However,
most literature on inter-organisational relationships between business partners directly
use consumer-based terms such as trust and commitment as relationship quality constructs
(Hennig-Thurau et al., 2002; Hewett, Money, & Sharma, 2002; Leuthesser, 1997; Smith,
1998). The research on inter-organisational relationship quality is still in its early stages;
hence, there is no general agreement on its concept and dimensions.
The categories of trust and commitment did not emerge in our survey of critical inci-
dents for either the final customers or the intermediary customers. Instead, categories of
cooperation, coordination, and atmosphere were found to be the important factors. Most
of the literature on consumer relationship quality illustrates that customer satisfaction is
an antecedent to aspects of relationship quality such as trust and commitment (Bennet
& Barkensjo, 2005; Hennig-Thurau & Klee, 1997; Shemwell, Yavas, & Bilgin, 1998).
Hence, the trust and commitment of customers to service providers are only formed
when customers have repeatedly and cumulatively experienced satisfaction in service
encounters. It is not surprising, therefore, that we found no trust or commitment incidents
in our CIT survey, the purpose of which was to explore the incidents of service quality that
resulted in customer satisfaction.
Unlike the cognitive quality attributes of SERVQUAL, the attributes of trust and com-
mitment are too affective and consequential to provide useful information directly to a
service provider who wants to improve service activities by controlling quality measures.
Three categories in our CIT survey directly refer to the contents of exchange and inter-
action between organisations. The three categories enable the service provider to
control and improve these attributes for the advancement of the service and the enhance-
ment of customer satisfaction. With regard to customer satisfaction, we might call trust
and commitment an ex-post relationship quality; and cooperation, coordination, and
atmosphere an ex-ante relationship quality. Based on the International/Industrial Market-
ing and Purchasing Group (IMP) framework of relationships, Woo and Ennew (2004)
operationalised cooperation, adaptation, and atmosphere as attributes of relationship
quality in business-to-business relationships; they then illustrated that the attributes
were antecedent to satisfaction.
Woo and Ennew suggest that relationship quality includes behavioural and attitudinal
elements. In our survey, we found that the cooperation and coordination categories were
behavioural indicators of relationship quality, and that the atmosphere was an attitudinal
indicator. However, we found no instance of the adaptation category of the IMP, which
implies an idiosyncratic investment in the relationships. This is because there is little
risk in the government’s investment in social welfare centres. In Korea, the governance
and budget of social welfare centres are entirely controlled by the governments, but the
centres are operated by non-profit social welfare organisations. If an organisation gives
up its role of operating a centre, the government can easily contract another qualified oper-
ator to perform the same role. Moreover, because the government raises half of each
welfare centre’s budget and maintains auditing control, it can easily recover their invest-
ment from the agency if the relationship deteriorates. In our survey, the coordination
category was more evident than the adaptation category.
Cooperation
The cooperation category implies that all activities are undertaken jointly or in collabor-
ation with others in the pursuit of common interests (Young & Wilkinson, 1997). Further-
more, the members of an organisation are often willing to engage in cooperative behaviour
in order to maintain mutually beneficial relationships and to achieve common goals
(Metcalf, Frear, & Krishnan, 1992). The cooperation category includes all critical beha-
viours that involve communication, collaboration, devolution, or additional support.
We observed three types of communication incidents, namely information sharing,
prior consultations, and field understanding. While the prior consultation incidents high-
light the procedural imperative that discussion with collaborators should precede the
final decision-making, the actual field understanding incidents represent daily efforts to
understand the reality of service fields and enhance the knowledge on the fields. Similar
to the IMP framework, we can classify the communication-related incidents into categories
of information and social exchange, both of which make short-term communication dis-
tinguishable from long-term cooperation. Nonetheless, we assigned the communication
incidents to the cooperation category because the detailed descriptions of these incidents
indicated a long-term and stable quality.
The collaboration incidents described two organisations jointly making decisions about
goals and programmes, jointly implementing programmes, or jointly solving problems.
Additionally, the incidents concerning the government’s active devolution of function,
authority, and resources to collaborating agencies were also assigned to the cooperation
category. On the other hand, the devolution incidents may represent the structural aspect of
a relationship, that is, the power relationship between two organisations. If functions, auth-
orities, and resources are transferred to a collaborating agency from the government, the
power relationship changes and the agency becomes more autonomous and accountable
for the service delivery. This autonomy and accountability is satisfying for the collaborat-
ing agency. Hence, in the future, we should empirically test the possibility of identifying
devolution as another category that represents the structural aspect of a relationship.
Finally, the additional resource support from the government to a collaborating agency
were also found in the cooperation incidents. These incidents may be confused with the
resourcefulness category of design quality. The budget-related incidents of the resource-
fulness category refer to the sufficiency of the budget in terms of delivering the public
service. The budget is determined by the legislation process. Hence, the task of revising
predetermined items of expense to meet changing needs is difficult to achieve. On the
other hand, the budget-related incidents of additional support within the cooperation cat-
egory refer to the support that a local government offers a collaborating agency in terms of
flexible lending within the budgetary limit.
Coordination
Instead of using the adaptation category of the IMP, we identified the coordination cat-
egory as a behavioural relationship quality. This category reflects a distinctive feature
of public services: namely, the multilateral relations of organisations that participate in
the delivery process or network of public services. The government still has the primary
responsibility for providing public services even when the actual services are delivered
by non-public organisations. As more functions are consigned to outside organisations,
the government’s role of coordinating the service network becomes more important. In
such cases, the government is not the direct provider of public services, but the coordinator
of a public service network.
The coordination category includes the incidents in which the government (1) separ-
ately allocates the role, function, authority, and resources to each agency; (2) mediates
the disputes between agencies and resolves their conflicts; and (3) connects each
service agency to what a customer needs and then provides an integrated service solution
for the customer.
In our survey, dozens of social workers described incidents in which they were dissa-
tisfied by the duplication of functions and services between agencies in the commissioning
of social welfare services. Aside from emphasising the importance of the linkage and part-
nership between agencies, the social workers suggested that the government should coor-
dinate and manage the agencies effectively so that they could provide services that the
customers wanted and needed.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere category, which refers to the overall climate surrounding a relationship,
represents the basic attitude of public servants to intermediary customers. The atmosphere
mediates the influence of exchange activities between them (namely the service exchange,
financial exchange, information exchange, or social exchange).
In our survey, we found numerous incidents with a dissatisfactory atmosphere. Many
social workers complained about the bureaucratic attitude and behaviour of public ser-
vants; and they referred to the vertical subordinate relationship by which the government
exercises unilateral authority and control over service agencies. They also said that the
government often insists too much on formal procedures such as regulatory rules and dis-
cipline, to ensure procedural fairness and accountability. Conceptually, these attitudes are
closely related to the bureaucratic culture in the public administration field (Chun &
Rainey, 2005).
Bureaucracy strongly affects the service attitude of public servants. It can also be a bad
influence on the cooperation and coordination process of a relationship, and tends to jeo-
pardise the responsiveness and effectiveness of a public service. As shown in Table 1, all
the incidents that pertain to the atmosphere category were dissatisfactory. Atmosphere,
which mainly reflects the bureaucratic behaviour of governments, is a hygiene qualifier.
Is relationship quality independent of other quality variables?

Incidents concerning the coordination and atmosphere categories seem to have similar fea-
tures as responsiveness or empathy within process quality. However, a closer examination
of the detailed descriptions of related incidents reveals that, the incidents classified as
responsiveness, empathy, or assurance are attributed to the personal and spontaneous
goodwill or bad will of individual public servants engaged in the service encounter. Fur-
thermore, the close examination reveals that red tape incidents are related to the organis-
ational attitude of the government towards the collaborating agencies, and that this attitude
is too culturally ingrained to be changed.
By the same token, the field understanding incidents within the cooperation category
seem to be behaviourally similar to the adaptability incidents within the responsiveness
category or the caring incidents within the empathy category. However, these types of
incidents differ because a public servant’s field understanding comes from the long-
term accumulation of knowledge and information about the relevant fields. Process
quality, on the other hand, emphasises immediate responsiveness to changes in situations
and customer needs. Process quality may be affected by relationship quality, although
short-term improvement of process quality does not always lead to an improvement in
relationship quality.
The customer’s perception of relationship quality can only change after repetitively
experiencing process quality over a long period. A change in relationship quality
implies a cultural change in the organisation of public servants, which may lead to attitu-
dinal changes in individual public servants. This can result in the improvement of empathy
or responsiveness of individual service encounters. The arguments provided here corre-
spond to some of existing research, saying that a good relationship quality always provides
a good process quality; although the opposite is not always true (Gummesson, 1987; Woo
& Ennew, 2004).
Relationship quality can also influence design quality of a public service. For example,
if communications were good in the process of policymaking and service designing, then
procedural justice and practical substantiality of policy (the design quality attributes)
could be improved. We leave the examination of the independence of the quality dimen-
sions to subsequent empirical confirmation studies.
Design quality
In the services marketing field, service design quality has not yet been studied in detail,
except in the work of Gummesson (1993). That seems natural because one of the distinc-
tive features of service is the relative ambiguity and flexibility of the design itself (Slack,
Chambers, & Johnston, 2004). However, customers participate personally in the service
production process to receive a service, and this type of participation may provide custo-
mers with more opportunity to experience the actual service design and perceive design
quality (Zeithaml et al., 2006).
Design quality has been studied mainly in the manufacturing field. Many programmes
aiming at improving design quality of products have been implemented extensively in
manufacturing industries since the 1990s. The fact that design quality contributes
greatly to other quality dimensions and product performances is now generally accepted.
With a notable exception of Fynes and Búrca (2005), service researchers have paid
little attention to the causal relationship between design quality and the performances.
The reason for this neglect seems to be that design quality, like outcome quality, is too
technical and product-specific to be generalised into common attributes.
In our study, design quality comprises two dimensions: a technical design quality and
an experiential design quality. The technical design quality, which is concerned with the
specifications and standards of services, is too service-specific to be generalised into
common terms. Moreover, the technical design quality is defined only in the technical
language used by the designer and is mostly measured quantitatively. Hence, technical
design quality incidents should be difficult to appear in a CIT survey. Actually, all the
incidents in our results were related to the experiential design quality.
At the beginning of this study, we expected the critical incidents to be classified into
exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories that would enable us to clarify where their
quality responsibility lies and where each quality variable should be measured in the
design process of policy and service. Sanderson (1996) suggested that the public
service quality should be structuralised in the hierarchical order of institution, policy,
service, and organisation. There is indeed an alternative way to classify design quality
into a service design quality and a process design quality, and this alternative way is
similar to the classification scheme widely used in manufacturing industries, where
design quality is separated in terms of product and process. However, our CIT results
did not produce the results we hoped to see.
We classified the critical incidents that pertained to design quality into three cat-
egories: policy design, policy implementation, and resourcefulness. However, actual
quality problems that frequently occur in the design process of public policy and
service itself cannot be fully explained with these three categories. It is also difficult to
reveal the consistency between policies and procedural accountability, which is widely
discussed dimensions of quality in the public sector. These limits are from the research
design, which focuses on identifying the quality dimensions affecting customer satisfac-
tion. More empirical studies should be carried out to fill this gap.
Policy design
The policy design category refers to the quality of the policy contents that are developed
and determined in the policymaking stage. This category includes incidents related to the
strategic adequacy of policy and the tactical substantiality of policy measures. The stra-
tegic adequacy attribute comprises the following items: (1) the political, social, legal, or
procedural legitimacy of policy; (2) the strategic alignment of policy with government
agenda; and (3) the consistency between current policy and existing or related policies
and so on. However, only incidents related to social legitimacy and the absence of a specific
policy appeared in our CIT results for design quality. Tactical substantiality can also
comprise multiple items: (1) the concreteness of tactical objectives and policy measures;
(2) the procedural democracy, such as listening to public opinion; (3) the redundancy of
public policy or service systems; and (4) the actuality of addressing the cause of problems
and so on. As with the strategic adequacy attribute, only incidents related to the concrete-
ness and practicability of policy measures appeared in our CIT results.
The attributes of design quality are hard to be recognised by external members because
of the information asymmetry. In the manufacturing industry, the attributes of design
quality that external customers can perceive after using a product are features and dura-
bility; but they cannot know the detailed technical quality variables that determine features
and durability. In the service industry, on the other hand, customers have more opportunity
to experience the design quality because the boundary between a service product and a
service process is somewhat ambiguous and services are produced and consumed at the
same time (Slack et al., 2004; Zeithaml et al., 2006). Social workers have even more
opportunity to experience design quality than beneficiaries do because social workers
are similar to the internal employees of a government organisation. Nevertheless, the

scope of design quality that social workers can experience turn out to be relatively narrow.
Because accountability and procedural transparency are more important in a public
service than in a private sector, the attributes of design quality in a public service must
be defined in detail, measured accurately, and be fully open to the public. To develop
more concrete attributes of design quality, further investigation is needed with respect
to the role of public servants and specialists in developing public policy and designing
public services.
Policy implementation
The policy implementation category refers to the quality of the implementation principle
of a policy and service. We may classify this category into process quality but we put it
into design quality because the basic principle for operating a public policy and service
is determined by governmental legislation. The incidents that were included in this cat-
egory are related to the flexibility, equity, or consistency principles of policy execution
and the service operation process.
The flexibility incidents in the policy implementation category indicate whether
the budget is flexible and whether the criteria for determining the scope of beneficiaries
are applied adaptively to changing conditions. The flexibility incidents are similar to the
process quality attributes such as responsiveness and empathy, especially in an organisation,
which respond adaptively to the various needs of customers. However, the flexibility of the
scope and standards of the beneficiary services is determined by the legislative process
because the public service necessitates procedural accountability. If the scope and limit of
flexibility are not specified explicitly in the design stage of a service, the flexibility principle
cannot be permitted to deliver the public service. Given their conceptual similarity, equity
and fairness may be grouped into one category within process quality. However, because
the equitable allocation of the budget and the distributional justice for beneficiaries are
determined formally in the design stage of the policy and service, we categorised equity
as part of the design quality attributes and fairness as part of process quality attributes.
The consistency incidents in the policy implementation category refer to a stable
budget, consistent orders from the government, and the continuity of a service. These inci-
dents imply that long-term continuous service is impossible if the budget fluctuates or if
officials in charge are frequently replaced. In addition, some incidents emphasised the
need for the administrative orders of authorities to have the same direction as previous
orders to prevent field workers from being confused.
Note that no satisfactory incidents were collected in relation to the policy

implementation category. All these attributes of service quality can be considered as
hygiene qualifiers.
Resourcefulness
The resourcefulness category refers to how sufficiently the public service is provided with
various tangible resources such as human, physical, and financial resources. Because
decisions on allocating and utilising resources are made in the design stage of a public
service, we can reasonably identify resourcefulness as a design quality attribute. In
addition, the resourcefulness category includes incidents that refer to inefficient resource
allocation because the actual value and potential of resources to be used in a service
depend on the efficiency of the operations.
The incidents pertaining to the resourcefulness category were much more frequently
found as dissatisfying rather than satisfying. This result seems to reflect the reality of
the social welfare systems in developing countries, where the budget and the compen-
sation for employees tend to be relatively low. However, given the number of satisfactory
incidents that referred to the physical resource support of the government, careful allo-
cation of resources may induce more satisfaction of social workers.
Conclusion and discussion

In this study, we have attempted to explicate the constructs of public service quality. We
used the CIT, an explorative tool in services marketing, to identify the attributes of service
quality that lead to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of final customers and intermediary
customers. We surveyed both the final customers and intermediary customers for two
reasons: first, because the customers of public services are diverse and heterogeneous;
and, second, because privatisation has been popular throughout the world. Privatisation,
which refers here to the provision of public services through non-public agencies, has
been accepted as a prevalent delivery mode of public services. In the service delivery
process, intermediary customers play the role of internal customers of a service value
chain. We therefore conducted the CIT survey among beneficiaries as well as social
workers who work in a social welfare service. As noted earlier, the social welfare
service is a representative public service. Figure 2 shows a summary of the results. Our
major findings are as follows:
. We observed that beneficiaries reported much more satisfactory incidents than dis-
satisfactory incidents but the frequency pattern for social workers was in the reverse
order. This observation suggests that the public’s expectation for public services
must be low because, first, the social welfare services are virtually provided for
free and, second, because the social welfare system in developing countries is rela-
tively immature.
. We identified four dimensions of the public service quality: design quality, process
quality, outcome quality, and relationship quality. As noted earlier, the service
quality dimension is yet to be fully explained in both the private sector and the
public sector. Moreover, scant attention has been paid to design quality and relation-
ship quality in the public sector. By breaking down these dimensions into categories,
we identified the attributes of the public service quality and then established a classi-
fication scheme. The scheme is to be used as the basis for developing measurement
and causal models of public service quality.
Figure 2. Public service quality and customer satisfaction for two types of customers.
. We found new process quality attributes such as fairness and participation, which
had not previously been identified or discussed in relation to private services. We
also introduced the new attributes of design quality, outcome quality, and relation-
ship quality, few of which had previously been empirically identified in service
quality literature. In addition, based on the frequency data of incidents, we classified
the attributes of service quality as satisfiers and dissatisfiers.
. The frequency patterns of the satisfactory incidents and dissatisfactory incidents dif-
fered significantly in relation to whether the customers were final customers or inter-
mediary ones. As shown in Figure 2, final customers such as beneficiaries generally
regard process quality and outcome quality as the most important qualities, whereas
intermediary customers generally attach greater importance to design quality and
relationship quality.
Although we have considered the reliability and content validity of the classification
scheme to be satisfactory, we are unable to say that the scheme has a high degree of
empirical confidence. The criterion-related validity and construct validity cannot be guar-
anteed in the CIT. Because of the explorative nature of our research, we only provide a
new quality model to be used in public service research. In order to establish empirical
validity, we should conduct statistical tests and analyses on the classification scheme
and on the attributes of service quality in the model.
Our base model of service quality systematically shows the hierarchical structure of
the public service quality. However, it is a future subject of empirical tests to confirm
the causal relationships among the dimensions of service quality. In the previous
section, we referred to the possibility of causal relationships based on conceptual infer-
ences. The empirical investigation of the existence and structure of the suggested causal
relationships would thus be very interesting and fruitful.
Another interesting and important point to be noted here is that of the systematic differ-
ences of satisfiers and dissatisfiers between intermediary and final customers. Our findings
can be extended to private services, where a service value chain is designed and developed
by a powerful upstream agent and the implementation task of the service creation and
delivery process is delegated to different agents. In many franchised service businesses,
the relationship between the franchiser headquarters and franchisees is structurally equiv-
alent to the relationship between the government and social welfare centres. The service
quality finally experienced by consumers of McDonalds and Starbucks is designed in the
respective companies’ headquarters. Increasing global expansion of service franchises
reveals to us that the conflicts between the corporate headquarters and the foreign franchi-
sees are increasing. The insights from our study explain that the franchisees are intermedi-
ary customers of the franchisers, and their quality perceptions cannot be similar to the final
customers.
Finally, this study should be extended to other stakeholders to clarify the representative
model of public service quality. Because the final and intermediary customers represent
only a portion of the various stakeholders of public service, we need to extend this study
to private firms, NGOs, NPOs, quasi-public organisations, the press, and academics.
Such an extension would widen the discussion of public service quality with respect to
conflicts of interest among stakeholders; it would also address the issue of using public
quality management as a political process to resolve these problems.
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Haifa Library]

On: 23 October 2013, At: 08:34

The Service Industries Journal

Public service quality and customer

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02642060902793441

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Public service quality and customer satisfaction: exploring

Beyond the existing SERVQUAL-based research, the authors develop an alternative

ISSN 0264-2069 print/ISSN 1743-9507 online

Scope of the survey

Final customers and intermediary customers

Figure 1. Service delivery chain and customers in public service.

quality management, governments must distinguish final customers from intermediary

included both beneficiaries and social workers as customers.

Results: a model of public service quality

Classification scheme and frequency pattern

Table 1. Classification scheme and frequency of critical incidents.

S. Rhee and J. Rha

The Service Industries Journal

for social workers.

Furthermore, the incidents that referred to the non-professionalism of public servants in

service. These indicate that the beneficiaries occasionally participate as recipients as

Is relationship quality independent of other quality variables?

are similar to the internal employees of a government organisation. Nevertheless, the

Note that no satisfactory incidents were collected in relation to the policy

Conclusion and discussion

Investigating delightful and terrible shopping experiences. Journal of Business Research,

Marketing, 14(8), 737–765.

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