Public sector reputation and netpromoter score

Juho Hakola,Vilma Luoma-Aho,María José Canel

doi:10.1007/s12208-021-00280-9

Abstract

Reputation of public sector organizations is increasingly formed through Word of Mouth (WOM) as citizens and stakeholders share their experiences with others both online and offline. Understanding and measuring WOM is a challenge for many public sector organizations, who often resort to measurement tools designed for the private sector. This paper looks at a popular WOM measurement tool, namely the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the context of public sector organizations. In this paper, we ask how well does the NPS describe public sector reputation, and look at what the different stakeholder groups categorized by NPS are like in the public sector. As an illustrative case, we report findings of a stakeholder reputation survey (n: 1198) conducted for a large Finnish ministry utilizing both established reputation measures and the NPS. Based on our findings, we conclude that the traditional NPS requires tailoring to match the public sector context, and propose “The Public Sector Net Promoter Score (PSNPS)” as a new measure for WOM in the public sector context.

Highlights

What citizens and individuals say about public sector organizations is central for western democracy, as engaged and communicative citizens improve the overall quality of public services (Dahlberg and Holmberg 2013; Delli Carpini et al 2004; Gelders et al 2007)
This paper looks at a popular Word of Mouth (WOM) measurement tools from the private sector, namely the Net Promoter Score (Reichheld 2003)
WOM has been suggested to contribute to organizational reputation, and we look at public sector reputation

Summary

Introduction

What citizens and individuals say about public sector organizations is central for western democracy, as engaged and communicative citizens improve the overall quality of public services (Dahlberg and Holmberg 2013; Delli Carpini et al 2004; Gelders et al 2007). As the operating environment for public sector organizations becomes increasingly digital, citizen expectations have changed (Canel and Luoma-aho2019, 129; Etter et al 2019). Many public sector organizations still rely on traditional means of citizen feedback when developing the public services. Current forms of engaging citizens in service development or co-creation of public services remains a legibility challenge, as public sector organizations in their communication “..generally impose a heavy cognitive load on citizens and open the door for strategies of obfuscation of various types” (Picci 2012, 142). Citizen-centric services and citizen centric feedback channels have been called for to better serve the new expectations of citizens (Bourgon 2009)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion