Service Quality Through Government Proactivity: The Concept of Non-interaction

Abstract

In the course of digitalization, governments increasingly aim at improving service quality for their users. To support this aim, government proactivity is considered a suitable approach: reduction of interactions or even non-interaction between users and government. While government proactivity can be crucial for improving the service quality perceived by its users, there is a lacking of understanding how exactly non-interaction interplays with service quality. Understanding this interplay is important, given that for some services non-interaction might also decrease service quality: for instance, non-interactive student loans spare the user the application but at the same time cause automatic debt. We introduce the purpose of an interaction as a lens to help understand this interplay. The lens utilizes the fact that the purpose of an interaction has to be fulfilled also in a proactive, non-interactive version of the service. We operationalize the lens by proposing two groups of interaction purposes and integrating them with service quality dimensions in an analysis framework. The framework can be used to analyze individual services towards their service quality in a proactive, non-interactive version of the service. Our work contributes to theory by developing a set of interaction purposes to study service interactions and the qualitative interplay of non-interaction and service quality on a service level. Based on an exemplary application of the service free school transport, we demonstrate how government service designers can adapt the framework into a tool for the evaluation and design of individual services.