Assessment of Service Quality Perception Gap between Service Seekers and Service Providers of Land Services in Rwanda

Purpose: This study aimed to assess the determinants of customer satisfaction from the perspective of service seekers and service providers using SERVQUAL. Methodology: the study employed both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The survey method was used to collect primary quantitative data. Probability sampling was employed to select both service seekers and service providers. 422 service seekers were randomly selected from a list of 53,158 people. 45 service providers were also randomly selected from 416 land officers. A data collection tool was developed for service seekers and customized for service providers. The validity of the research tool was tested and the results showed a P-value of 0.00. Cronbach’s Alpha calculation was employed to test reliability and resulted in an output of 0.932 > 0.7 which shows excellent reliability. Key informant interviews were also conducted with purposively selected respondents to collect their opinions on service quality to complement the quantitative data. Findings: From the perspective of service seekers, the findings showed that the five service quality dimensions are positive and significant predictors of satisfaction. The data from the service providers show that only empathy is a positive and significant predictor of satisfaction whereas, the other four dimensions are positive but less significant predictors of satisfaction. The study results revealed a discrepancy between service seekers and service providers in the dimensions that predict the satisfaction of customers with land services more than others.


INTRODUCTION
Service quality is an essential part of the satisfaction of customers in any service setting.Land services everywhere are always highly demanded and involve lots of complexities, especially in areas where the land administration system is not yet streamlined.Enhancing the quality of land services is highly dependent on the interaction between service providers and service seekers to clearly understand their expectations and endeavour to meet them without compromising the quality.In many settings, the quality of service is considered to be a major connection between the providers of service and their customers (Anak et al., 2020).Customers consider service quality an essential determinant factor of the repurchase to many customers (Zeithaml et al., 2020).When customers interact with those who offer them services and receive the expected care and courtesy, they desire to stick to the same service providers for that particular service or similar services.
In a public sector setting, service delivery means offering essential resources that people need in their daily lives which may include water, electricity, health care, education, housing, and infrastructure (Samitier, 2017).Governments are obliged to provide essential services to their citizens to ensure that their livelihoods are improved and that they can engage in meaningful development.In addition, the contribution of the service sector to the gross domestic product of many countries has always been significant (Ghani & O'Connell, 2016).It is also believed that services contribute over 75% of the global economy and 45% of this contribution is a share of the developing countries (Ghani & O'Connell, 2016).Ghani and O'Connell argue that services made more contributions to the growth of GDP, creation of jobs, and reduction of poverty than the industry.
In the case of Rwanda, the contribution of the service sector to GDP was 48% of GDP (10.944 billion) in 2021 and 47% in 2023.This percentage is planned to increase to more than 70% by 2024 (NISR, 2016).Currently, the accountability for delivering services for many governments to their people is very high and the desire to keep improving service delivery is more visible than ever before.Those who are not ready to adjust and continuously improve the delivery of services to the people are likely to become irrelevant.They need consistent mechanisms to regularly assess their performance in delivering services to the people (Eneanya, 2018;Masiya et al., 2019) to legitimize their existence.

Problem statement
For the last two decades, Rwanda placed effective and efficient service delivery to citizens at the center of its development agenda and, as a result, all sectors show in their plans how they intend to satisfy the needs of citizens.The government of Rwanda has also mandated the Rwanda Governance Board to regularly assess the satisfaction of citizens with service delivery in different sectors.The findings of the assessments are discussed with concerned institutions and these institutions come up with plans of how they are going to address the service delivery gaps that are raised by citizens.Public institutions are required to develop and implement service charters as guiding frameworks to enhance service delivery and those who fail to implement them are held accountable by responsible authorities.Despite all these efforts, there are still challenges that hinder service delivery in all sectors.

Study objective
1. To examine the perception of service seekers and providers on the predictors of citizens' satisfaction with land services using SERVQUAL dimensions 2. To assess if there is or there is no perception gap between service seekers and providers on the predictors of citizens' satisfaction with land services

LITERATURE REVIEW
Service delivery is a continuous practice of planning, implementation, review, and improvement to ensure that customer-focused services are offered (Masiya et al., 2019;Parker et al., 2023;Prashar & Antony, 2018).Additionally, the service sector plays a key role in the growth of economies both in the developed and developing countries (Ghani & O'Connell, 2016).
A service can be defined as an elusive work provided by someone or by an organization to another person or organization that offers value or that satisfies a need of the receiver (Han et al., 2021).The difference between a service and a product is that a service is intangible, heterogeneous, perishable, and simultaneous in its production and consumption.There is no exchange of physical things between the provider and the receiver of the service (Ali & Garg, 2017;Koti, 2018).This implies that there is no tangible exchange of ownership that happens between the provider and receiver of the service.Services are offered either by traders or public servants to other people needing the services for a particular purpose e.g.land transfer service in Rwanda can be provided either by private individuals acting on behalf of a public entity or by a public entity directly to individuals or organizations (Koti, 2018).The general trend worldwide is to enhance the quality of service to people as a strategy to withstand competition that has consistently grown rapidly.Service delivery has been a key priority for the government of Rwanda because of its impact on the livelihoods of people.The service sector has also been a significant contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with a contribution of 47% in 2023 (NISR, 2023), and is expected to grow in the coming years.Service delivery is an unceasing exercise of preparation, execution, evaluation, and improvement to guarantee that services tailored to the needs of the customer are provided (Masiya et al., 2019;Parker et al., 2023;Prashar & Antony, 2018).
Service delivery refers to the process of providing a service to someone with the purpose of satisfying that person (Ramya et al., 2019).This delivery process needs to warrant top quality, reliability, and consistency and should also stimulate efficiency for those seeking the service as well as those offering the service.Regarding this research, the delivery of service is regarded as the process of giving the right service to someone requiring it at the right time and with the right attitude.The right attitude refers to the acts of making someone feel cared for, valued, and respected to cause that person to leave with a desire to come back for the same service or a different service in the same place.Delivering quality service is an important marketing tool for businesses without incurring high costs for advertising their products or services.Customer satisfaction promotes acquisition, retention as well as loyalty (Dam & Dam, 2021).
Service quality is defined as the difference between what the customer expects and what the customer receives (Anttila & Jussila, 2017;Fida et al., 2020).To determine the actual service, there must be an interaction between the service seeker and the service provider which results in the actual customer experience which may be qualified as quality or absence of it.One of the early quality theorists defined the concept of quality as having two basic dimensions (Grönroos, 1984).Grönroos called the first dimension the technical quality which he says is a result of customers interfacing with the service provider and the second dimension the functional quality which he refers to as the mode of delivery of the service to the customer such as courteousness, care, and timeliness.The two basic quality dimensions are closely related to the five quality dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy) advanced by Parasuraman et al. (1991).
In Rwanda's context, the quality of service is understood as the obligation of the government to accelerate the socioeconomic transformation of people through effective and efficient service delivery.In the medium-term development strategy of Rwandathe National Strategy for Transformation (NST1), service quality was a key mediating variable in the transformational journey that Rwanda is pursuing (MINECOFIN, 2017).The NST1 aimed at attaining 90% of citizens' satisfaction with service quality received from public institutions by 2024 which is not likely to be achieved despite all the efforts invested by the government in the process.Any initiative to help the government understand what more needs to be done to enhance the quality of service would be received with much attention.This offers this research much relevancy both to policy and practice.

The SERVQUAL
The SERVQUAL model which has been applied widely across the globe was advanced by Parasuraman et al. (1985).SERVQUAL tool was originally composed of ten service quality dimensions that were later condensed to the current five (Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurances, Empathy, and Tangibility) (Parasuraman et al., 1988).In recent years, the SERVQUAL model has dominated the assessment of service quality in many settings to assess the actual service experience against anticipated service quality to determine the satisfaction level of customers or its absence (Parasuraman et al., 1985).SERVQUAL is believed to help organizations gauge service gaps using variables that predict satisfaction and design strategies to fill them Jonkisz et al. (2021).Over the years, SERVQUAL has been extensively cherished and used to measure service quality in several settings in the academic field and in industrial practice in various fields (Murdifin et al., 2019)

Serve Quality Dimension
The five service quality dimensions of SERVQUAL were employed to examine the perception of service seekers and service providers on the predictors of citizens' satisfaction with land transfer services in Rwanda.The five dimensions of tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, and Empathy advanced by Parasuraman et al. (1985) have been widely used to measure service quality in various fields and contexts (Zygiaris et al., 2022).Depending on the nature of the service being measured and the context, the predictive power of each service quality dimension may vary.

Service quality
The quality of service may be defined as an organization's capacity to respond to the needs of customers with efficiency and effectiveness in order to pursue profitability and to remain as a going concern (Ramya et al., 2019).Service quality is defined from the perspective of the customer since customer satisfaction is an essential element of quality.Organisations should therefore endeavour to design their service chain to tailor their processes to the needs of their customers.

Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction refers to value resulting from consuming a product or service in response to a need (Agnihotri, et al., 2019).Customer expectations emanate from a desire to fulfil a need which may be inherent or explicit but whatever form it takes, it requires a response.In responding to their needs, customers purchase goods or services and the extent to which customers are satisfied determines their repeat purchases or not.People purchase and consume services with expectations to derive satisfaction from them (Gunawan, 2022;Hamzah & Shamsudin, 2020;Lim et al., 2020) and at the same time, service providers are motivated when their customers get satisfied continuously as it gives them a guarantee of keeping their customers and possibly attracting more (Ilias & Shamsudin, 2020;Zakari & Ibrahim, 2021).

Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework is a reflection of the sequence of actions the researcher anticipates to carry out in a research project.The conceptual framework for this study defines the relationship between the variables (Dag & Andreas, 2022).The conceptual framework for this study relates the service quality dimensions with the satisfaction of service seekers from their own perspective and the perspective of the service providers.

Research hypotheses:
H01: There is no relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and outcome variable (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service seekers H11: There is a relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and the outcome variable (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service seekers H02: There is no relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and outcome variable (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service providers H12: There is a relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and outcome variables (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service providers H03: There is no perception gap between service seekers and service providers on the relationship between the predictor variables and outcome variable H13: There is a perception gap between service seekers and service providers on the relationship between the predictor variables and outcome variable

METHODOLOGY Data collection process
The study employed a mixed research approach to benefit from the triangulation of both methods and data (Hitchcock & Onwuegbuzie, 2020;Strijker et al., 2020).The survey population for the service seekers was 53,158 people who received land transfer services based on the records of the National Land Authority (2019).The study population of the land service providers was 216 people who represented all the 216 sector land offices in the 30 districts of Rwanda.In addition, 16 key informant interviews were conducted with purposively chosen service seekers.Data was collected from a sample of 422 service seekers and 45 service providers randomly selected from the above population sets.The first stage of sampling randomly selected five districts from the 30 districts and the second stage determined the sample size and calculation of the sample from each of the sampled districts was done.The same procedure was used to determine the sample of service providers from the five sampled districts.The main data collection tools were a questionnaire and an interview guide.A questionnaire was used to collect primary quantitative data while qualitative data was collected using an interview guide.The questionnaire for service seekers was based on the five SERVQUAL dimensions (Parasuraman et al., 1985) and was adjusted for service providers.A five-item Likert scale was used to the perception of respondents on each of the items that were measured under each of the five dimensions.

Data analysis
The analysis of quantitative data was done using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and the analysis of qualitative data was done manually since the interviews were few and manageable.Demographic data was profiled using descriptive statistics and ANOVA was conducted to test whether the differences between means under the scale items were statistically significant (Ntumi, 2021;Patel et al., 2015).Logistics regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses.It is argued that the Logistic Regression is the most suitable model for the kind of data with a set of regression coefficients that predict the probability of the outcome of interest Tolles and Meurer (2016) as is the case for this research data.

Validity and Reliability
Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to test the validity of the research tool and the test results indicated that the questionnaire was comprehensive and valid for data collection with a P-value of 0.000.The reliability test was also conducted using Cronbach's Alpha calculation and the test result showed that the five-item scale was highly reliable with an output of 0.932 > 0.7 which resonates with the views of Zakariya (2022).

Source: Primary data, 2023
Table 1 above shows that 77.5% of service seekers who responded to the questionnaire were men while 22.5% were women.Rwamanaga and Kayonza Districts had the majority of service seekers who were sampled to respond to the questionnaire with 50% and 18.2% respectively.Table 8 above shows that sector land officers were 39 while the other six land services providers were directors of one-stop centers that offer a range of integrated services related to land such as land registration, construction permits, demarcation of land, and payment of land taxes.

Testing of the hypotheses
The study had three hypotheses to be tested; the first hypothesis used data from service seekers, the second hypothesis used data from service providers and the third hypothesis was answered using a comparative analysis of the test results from the first and second hypotheses.

H01:
There is no relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and the outcome variable (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service seekers.
The results of the hypotheses test using service seekers' data in Table 6 above showed that the five service quality dimensions (the predictor variables) are positive and significant predictors of the satisfaction of service seekers with land transfer services.Their significant level was also determined based on the predictive power of each of the dimensions.It was established that responsiveness is the highest predictor of citizens' satisfaction with land transfer services (Exp.(B):28.473:P-value: 0.00<0.05).This implies that an increase of one point in the responsiveness interventions to enhance service quality of land transfers will yield a twenty-eight times increase in the satisfaction of service seekers.The second highest positive and significant predictor of satisfaction is tangibles (Exp.(B): 26.231: P-value: 0.00<0.05).This means that an increase of one point in tangibles is likely to result in a corresponding increase of 26.231 points in the satisfaction of land service seekers in the ordered log odds when the other predictor variables in the model are kept constant.Reliability is the third highest predictor of satisfaction (Exp.(B): 15.596: P-value: 0.00<0.05)followed by empathy (Exp.(B): 9.467: P-value: 0.00<0.05)and lastly assurance (Exp.(B):6.215:P-value: 0.00<0.05).From these results, therefore, the null hypothesis was rejected, and the alternative hypothesis which states that "there is a positive and significant relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and outcome variable (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service seekers was accepted.
H02: There is no relationship between predictor variables (reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy & assurance) and the outcome variable (citizens' satisfaction) with land services from the perspective of service providers.
Based on the test results using data from service providers in Table 12 above, the hypothesis test results show that the five service quality dimensions are predictors of citizens' satisfaction with land transfer services.However, from the perspective of service providers, there is a difference in the predictive power of each of the dimensions compared to the results from the service seekers.The service providers consider empathy (Exp.(B): 11.758: P-value: 0.005<0.05)as the highest predictor of satisfaction of land transfer service seekers followed by Reliability (Exp.(B): 5.966: P-value: 0.092>0.05),responsiveness (Exp.(B): 2.382: P-value: 0.271>0.05),assurance (Exp.(B): 1.584: P-value: 0.672>0.05)and lastly tangibles (Exp.(B): 1.023: P-value: 0.961>0.05) in that order.According to service providers, empathy is a positive and significant predictor of satisfaction of service seekers while the other four dimensions are positive but less significant predictors of satisfaction of service seekers with land transfer services.

H03:
There is no perception gap between service seekers and service providers on the relationship between the predictor variables and outcome variable.Considering the results of the hypotheses testing presented in Table 13 above, it can be deduced that, there is a significant divergence in the experience of the service seekers and the perception of service providers on how the predictor variables (the five service quality dimensions) influence the satisfaction of service seekers with land services.From the two datasets and the hypotheses test results thereof, we can confidently construe that there is a divergence in understanding of what satisfies the service seekers between service providers and service seekers.Since quality is defined by customers' needs and expectations, the understanding of service providers on what satisfies the customers should conform to that of the service seekers.According to the service seekers, responsiveness is the highest predictor of satisfaction while service providers perceive that empathy is the highest predictor of service seekers' satisfaction.The hypotheses test results show that service providers do not take a keen interest in establishing what their customer's desire in their interaction during the land transfer services provision process.This was confirmed by the key informant interviews where 100% of the respondents mentioned that service providers never seek feedback from service seekers regarding their service experience.Additionally, the majority (99.9%) of respondents highlighted that there is poor communication between the land service providers and those who seek land services regarding the status of their application files.
Considering the test results from both the service seekers' and service providers' datasets and hypotheses test results, the third null hypothesis (H03) states that "there is no perception gap between service seekers and service providers on the relationship between the predictor variables and outcome variable" is rejected and the alternative hypothesis is accepted.

Conclusion
Overall, the research findings show that the five service quality dimensions are predictors of citizens' satisfaction with land transfer services.Based on the service seekers dataset, the five service quality dimensions (predictor variables) are positive and significant predictors of citizens' satisfaction with land transfer services.Responsiveness is viewed as the highest positive and significant predictor of satisfaction with Exp.(B): 28.473 points and a P-value of 0.00 while assurance is the lowest positive and significant predictor of citizens' satisfaction based on the responses from the service seekers with Exp.

Recommendations
 Land offices should put in place a mechanism to continuously gather feedback from land service seekers to ensure that, they are constantly informed of the needs of their customers and endeavour to satisfy them. Service provers should make quality improvement part of their priority targets in their annual performance contracts. Service providers need to develop and implement a capacity-building strategy aimed at enhancing the skills of their staff responsible for service quality to enhance their performance. Improve communication between service providers and service seekers in the service delivery process to keep them informed of the progress of their land transfer application files  Service providers need to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to create awareness to inform citizens of the requirements and the process taken to get land services.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: The Total Number of Land Services Providers Sampled Source: Primary data (2023) (B): 6.215 points and P-value 0.00.Considering the service Providers' dataset and related hypothesis test results, only empathy is a positive and significant predictor of citizens' satisfaction with land transfer services while the other four dimensions are positive but less significant predictors of satisfaction of citizens with land transfer services.The test results from service providers' dataset are empathy (Exp.(B): 11.758: P-value: 0.005<0.05);Reliability (Exp.(B): 5.966: P-value: 0.092>0.05);responsiveness (Exp.(B): 2.382: P-value: 0.271>0.05);assurance (Exp.(B): 1.584: P-value: 0.672>0.05)and lastly tangibles (Exp.(B): 1.023: P-value: 0.961>0.05).The findings also indicate a perception gap between service seekers and service providers on which dimension predicts service seekers' satisfaction with land services more than others.Recommendations are offered to bridge the perception gap to enhance land service quality.

Table 3 : Education Levels of Service Seekers Education level
Source: Primary data(2023)

Table 11 : Predictors' Coefficients with Tolerance and VIF Model Collinearity Statistics Tolerance VIF
Source: Primary data(2023)