Gap Analysis of Service Quality in Passport Office after Privatization: an Empirical Investigation

The concept of service quality has achieved great significance during the last few years and especially with the advent of globalization where customers are been exposed to the world market. The issue of quality has become more important in service industry owing to special characteristics like intangibility, perishability, variability and inseparability. But the delivery of the quality service does not only depend upon the providers, but it also depends upon the perception of the customers. This holds true for all the service areas like tourism, hospitality, banking, technology, education etc. The concept of service quality has its applicability in passport services also which had been privatized in the year 2008 with the idea "to deliver all Passport-related services to the citizens in a timely, transparent, more accessible, reliable manner&in a comfortable environment through streamlined processes and committed, trained&motivated workforce". Not much research has been done to investigate the quality of services at passport office after the revamping of the old process except for the pilot project conducted by Tata Consultancy Services (T.C.S) at Bengaluru&Chandigarh, which concluded that there were some service failures in the set up and after making the required improvements, 77 passport seva kendras were established and one of the same kind was established in Jammu also. With this backdrop, the aim of the present study is to find out the improvement in the quality of service after the privatization of the passport issuance process and to analyze the Gap in service expected by the customers viz a viz performance delivered by the passport office. The research methods used in the study are mean, Standard Deviation, Percentage and Importance Performance Analysis.