Public Service Reform: Measuring and Understanding Customer Satisfaction

This report presents the findings from a review of approaches to measuring and understanding customer satisfaction with public services, carried out by the MORI Social Research Institute for the Office for Public Services Reform (OPSR) at the Cabinet Office.

The main aims are to summarise existing research and literature, and to inform the growing interest in measuring satisfaction with public services. We have also incorporated conclusions and lessons from our own experience of measuring service quality and satisfaction for a large number of public and private organisations. The importance of improving the way we gather perceptions through surveys and our interpretation of the results should not be underestimated: as Dinsdale notes in a review of approaches to customer satisfaction research in Canada "if the importance ... is not immediately apparent, consider how survey results can have a dramatic impact on governments' agendas for action, the public's perception of government and public servants' perceptions of themselves".

There are a wide range of approaches to understanding satisfaction and service quality. Indeed, there are many who think the whole area is over-researched; a group of academics estimated that 15,000 trade and academic articles were written in the two decades up to the mid 90s.2 It is not surprising therefore that there are a number of disagreements and differences in concepts, definitions, measurement methods and interpretation. We have focused our review on highlighting what we think are useful elements from a number of approaches.