Customer satisfaction in central public works department

Abstract

Central Public Works Department, a government organization, has a unique position in the industry of construction and infrastructure providers. The opening up of the economy in India in the early 90s has created new challenges to all government organisations. Customer satisfaction and customer orientation concept is adopted to identify and prioritize the areas for improvement in the quality of services provided by CPWD to its various clients. The perceived quality of services provided by CPWD was measured using the SERQUAL instrument on selected attributes and the Gap Approach. The SERQUAL instrument was further integrated with Importance .Satisfaction model as in Common Measurement Tools of Canadian Centre for Management Development. Areas of improvement were identified by the quadrant approach method. Further correlation analysis was also conducted to find out possible relations between satisfaction scores and perception and importance scores. The results obtained by the GAP analysis were collaborated by the subsequent analysis. Sample questionnaire was filled from thirty-three departments mostly from Bangalore unit and few from Hyderabad and Nagpur units. It was found that CPWD was lacking considerably in the Reliability and Responsiveness attributes. The importance and satisfaction model also collaborate these findings by highlighting the factors which corresponds to Reliability and Responsiveness attributes like speed of service and deliver of promise made. The suggested structural, process and procedural changes in the institutional mechanism to improve the deficient attributes are: declaring vivid and clear goals of the departments which should be effectively disseminated right up to the lowest rank, involving clients to evaluate the performance of the staff, constant interaction with the client groups to receive feedback, giving more powers to the lower staffs in terms of finance and work related, especially at the superintending engineer level, leaving the higher officers to monitor and guide, training to departmental as well as contractors staff in dealing with the client department, cutting down procedural delays in award of contract by reducing duplicate works, motivating staff by introducing more levels of promotional avenues by way of designation as they grow in the department, introducing the concept of opportunity cost and performance measurement to enhance the decision making capacity of the officers and improve accountability in decision making, making department and client more accountable by measuring the cost of services provided and comparing the same with the industry average. These suggestions are expected to improve the working of the department as a whole and make it more reliable and responsive towards the client departments.