In the UK the Benefits Agency is seeking to process its business more efficiently, and commissioned research to investigate the number and nature of the contacts customers have with the Agency. The paper draws on this research and outlines the case for adopting a longitudinal perspective to...

This article sets out the main conclusions of a research project into how UK local authorities are managing within limited resources (MLR). Frameworks are developed to aid authorities to plan their approaches to MLR and to situate what they have already done and what they plan to do within a...

Highlights the increasing emphasis on customers and service quality in the new public sector. Emphasises the bias towards hard, easily quantifiable data and a focus on external customers in the measurement of service quality. Explores relationships through which grants for social housing are bid...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to integrate an augmented version of the Thompson et al. model of enterprise policy, delivery, practice and research with services marketing models including SERVQUAL and strategic conversations; and demonstrate a practical application of the analysed through...

Discusses the development of a 26‐item scale for assessing service quality in a UK construction professional service context. The research builds upon work undertaken by service marketing academics in the USA who have developed a generic service quality measurement instrument (SERVQUAL). The...

The significance of the quality of work in the construction industry has been highlighted in recent years. Nevertheless, it is unusual to find that housing refurbishment projects have been undertaken with a clear emphasis on the service provided for tenants. To assess the scope for tenant...

Quality problems in the service organization are the result of the mismatch between prior expectation and perceived quality of the service. Each organization will attempt to determine the requirements of its customers and translate these requirements into product and delivery process...

This paper explores differences in the implementation of total quality management (TQM) in different types of service process, using a typology which distinguishes between services positioned along the continua of volume and variety. A case‐study‐based analysis of the implementation of six...

Over the past decade, SERVQUAL has emerged as perhaps the most popular standardized questionnaire to measure service quality. In this study, a conceptual model, INTSERVQUAL, was designed based on the original “Gap Model”, to explore the extent to which the construct service quality plays in...

Previous research into the efficacy of the quality assurance standards in the ISO 9000 series has rarely focused upon their deployment in services. The UK standard Investors in People (IiP) has received relatively little research attention as a quality management method. The paper reports an...