Employees’ customer orientation and customer satisfaction in the public utility sector

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how perceived service quality mediates employees’ customer orientation and customer satisfaction in the public utility sector. Design/methodology/approach The study focused on the commercial customers (small and medium-scale enterprises– (SMEs)) of Electricity Company of Ghana Ltd. There were 350 SMEs sampled for the study, and each had no more than 99 employees. Respondents were either owner-managers or employee-managers. Structural equation model (SEM) was used in estimating the effects among the variables studied. Findings Most public institutions have a built-in customer base, and therefore places less emphasis on employees’ customer orientation. This notwithstanding, findings revealed that employees’ customer orientation behaviors significantly impacted customers’ perceived service quality and satisfaction toward public institutions. Similarly, customers’ perceived service quality influenced their satisfaction toward public institutions. SMEs serve as an engine for economic growth in an economy, and therefore public institutions must consider their peculiar needs in the delivery of service to them. Originality/value This study pointed out that, employees’ customer orientation behaviors of public institutions have an influence on customers’ perceived service quality and satisfaction. Previous studies on these concepts have largely focused on the private sector, where there are lots of competition. This study also specifically studied commercial customers (SMEs) of public institution, which is quite novel, especially in relation to the concepts studied. And the contribution of SMEs to economic growth makes their study even much more important.

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“…The results from CFA are presented as Table 2. As per model fit indices presented by past studies (such as, Hair et al, 2010;Dogbe et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019;Pomegbe et al, 2019), CMIN is expected to be statistically insignificant, CMIN/DF is expected to be less than 3, GFI should be at least 0.8, NFI, TLI and CFI are all expected to be greater than 0.9, whiles RMSEA and RMR are also expected to be less than 0.08. From Compared with competitors, our firm introduces new products that offer more radical features (e.g.…”

“…The mediating role of absorptive capacity age and size were also controlled for in recent firm-level studies such as this one (Dogbe et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019;Pomegbe et al, 2019).…”

Firm Performance and Competitive Advantage: The role of Green Supply Chain Management Practices

“…From the analysis, all the constructs had their AVE above 0.5 indicating high convergent validity. To ensure that there is discriminant validity as presented by Li et al (2019) and Dogbe et al (2019), the constructs were evaluated by comparing the square root of the AVEs (√AVEs) with the inter-correlation score. To achieve discriminant validity, the square root of the AVEs are supposed to be larger than the respective inter-correlation scores.…”

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“…The need of manufacturing products oriented on a customer (Li, Pomegbe, Dogbe, 2018), and also the following changes and turbulent environment, has generated the necessity to support actions of organizations on different stages (Cegliński, 2015;Siwiec, Bednarova, Pacana, 2020). It is important that these actions support the quality ones, which are applied in the improved performance of the production and service enterprises (Nilsson, Johnson, Gustafsson, 2001).…”