customer’s participation in service quality improvement: new paradigm in interaction of organization-client (case of: khorasan razavi customs)

abstract service quality has been an area of interest of both researchers and practitioners in recent years. in light of such interest, two distinctive schools have contributed to service quality and customer satisfaction. the first school focuses on the role of organizations and their staff as the origin of service quality improvement while the second one incorporates customer’s participation in the process of service provision and delivery as the means of improvement. this study investigates improvement of service quality from standpoint of the second school. for this purpose, a conceptual model was developed on the basis of rodie & klein (2000) theory that incorporates mental, physical and emotional dimensions of working area as well as a fourth dimension suggested by authors denoted as “interaction amongst clients”. research data was collected by means of two distinctive questionnaires that were designed for two populations. the first population consisted of pervious clients of regional customs from which a random sample of 154 was drawn from their records at the customs office. the second population known as service providers consisted of 53 employees of the custom offices operating in the province. instruments reliability was confirmed by figures of %91.54 and %91.39 of cronbach alfa respectively. the results of our study showed that clients play an important role in promoting service quality during their presence at customs offices and in interaction with staff. it was further noticed that there is a gap between what customs office expects from clients and the degree of involvement and actual contribution of clients in dealing with customs staff that eventually leads to their own satisfaction.