Service quality on three management levels : A study of service quality in public tendering contracts

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to deepen the understanding of how service quality factors are stipulated in advance within contracts, in order to ensure the providing of a high‐quality service to the user, when the service is contracted out to an external partner. It aims to identify, describe, and analyse the service quality descriptions included in contracts. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on case studies and focuses on a comparison of service quality factors in contracts. The empirical base is the public transport sector – a context in which the contracts are widely used, and where the service is standardised, continuous, capital intensive, and provided by external operators, but where contract solutions differ. The contracts analysed are those entered into between 21 public transport companies and their contracted external operators in Sweden. Findings – The study highlights that service quality factors in formal procurement contracts can be related to three interdependent management levels: the rhetorical level, the strategic level, and the operational level, in each of which the factors are described differently. Originality/value – The findings provide insight into how service quality is described and used in contracts at three different levels, when the service is provided in a complex business setting, where contractors aim to control the service by contractual means, since they are ultimately responsible for providing the service to the end‐users. The research also contrasts with previous research claiming that contractors fail to incorporate service quality from a user perspective, which is not the case in the studied contracts. The paper also makes an important contribution by empirically investigating physical contracts used in a public tendering context, which focus on service quality descriptions, as it has been acknowledged that there is a lack of empirical investigation of the nature and form of contractual arrangements.