Evaluating Government Services Based on User Perspective

Abstract

The adoption of digital services has changed the way governments interact with citizens. Evaluating service quality, based on the user satisfaction, has become an important tool to direct actions that may positively interfere in the quality of the service provided. In this paper, we present a service evaluation model based on the user perception. The instrument proposed, called Br-GovQual, was developed in cooperation with the Brazilian government for its partially digitalized public services. It responds to the peculiarities of the relations between the user, the public service and the way the service is offered. Also, it avoids the common tendency to automatically apply private sector practices to the public sector. The instrument was created and validated statistically with four Brazilian public services. As a result, this work presents a questionnaire covering five psychometric dimensions capable of safely measuring the perception of the user about the quality of the service obtained.