Evaluation of service quality of rural water and sewerage company using SERVQUAL model (case study: Rural settlements of Hamedan county)

The recipients of these services must evaluate organizations that provide services for rural areas to improve service delivery. Accordingly, this study aimed to evaluate Hamadan’s Rural Water & Sewage Company, which supplies the villages of Hamedan Province with potable water in terms of quality of service. Therefore, the assessment of rural residents' satisfaction with the quality of the services of Rural Water & Sewage Company was conducted by using the tool SERVQUAL. To assess and compare the villagers' expectations and their perception of the civil services, the assessment was conducted in five aspects of SERVQUAL scale indicates aesthetics, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, and empathy. The current study is conducted by descriptive-analytic method on random samples of 384 households of the proportion of rural households in rural settlements in the study area to assess the gap between expected and received services. The results show that although the situation of the rural areas has improved in physical aspects first and then in the sensible aspect, still it has not met the villagers' satisfaction. There is also an obvious gap between the villagers' expectations and their perceptions. There is a rather big gap between the quality of the services and the expectations of the resident. In other words, the Rural Water & Sewage Company failed to meet the complete satisfaction of the rural residents. Although the situation of the villages has been improved. But, in terms of some of the abovementioned five aspects ignoring the rural residents' wants has influenced the increase of the gap between their expectations and perceptions. So we suggest that the company should pay more attention to the villagers' views, wants, and needs in its programs and policies to improve the quality of its services.