SERVQUAL for Public Services

SERVQUAL is a multi-item survey instrument for measuring perceived service quality as the gap between what service users expect and what they perceive they received. Developed by A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard Berry — conceptually in their 1985 gap model and operationally in the 1988 22-item scale — it assesses quality along five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Applied to public services such as healthcare, licensing, social services and local government, SERVQUAL reframes citizens as service users whose expectations and perceptions can be measured, producing diagnostic gap scores that pinpoint where a public service is falling short of what the public expects.