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Measuring service quality

  • Status: completed
  • Duration: 2018-2019
  • Client: Accounting office of the Municipality of Enschede (Netherlands)
  • With: Wolfgang Ebbers Research & Consultancy (lead)

Project summary

Digitalization of service delivery is (still) high on the agenda of most government agencies around the world. Municipalities are no exception. However, it is incredibly important that no citizen is left behind and that service delivery is inclusive, accessible and usable to all citizens.

In this project we (under lead from WERC) evaluate the quality of online service delivery in Enschede. We find that people are satisfied in general, however, problems occur frequently and there is ample room for improvement. 

Background

In 2018, the Ombudsman in the Netherlands issued four guidelines for digitalisation of public services in the Netherlands,. According to these guidelines, governments should:

  • Take responsibility for the design and delivery of digital services.
  • Be accessible for every citizen, regardless of the channel used
  • Be solution oriented when problems or mistakes happen
  • Be user friendly for citizens, not just for governments themselves

These guidelines are important and many governments across the country aspire to adhere by them. The municipality of Enschede is no exception and the accounting office of this organisation asked us to evaluate the current quality, and organisation, of digital service delivery in the municipality.

The project

In the project, we focused on three goals:

  1. The translation of the guidelines above into an evaluation framework
  2. Enrichment of this framework and initial test through a series of interviews with stakeholders in the organisation
  3. Test of the framework through a quantitative study among citizens in the municipality.

Our role

We provided teo services within the project:

  1. We helped translate the guidelines into the study framework and provided general input.
  2. We managed the quantitative study in which the framework was evaluated. 

More information & deliverables

In Dutch: