The quality of a service is determined in part by its level of customer orientation. In 1995 and 1996, the Court of Audit investigated the level of customer orientation in 25 service-providing organisations. Some of these were departments attached to ministries, and others were autonomous administrative authorities. The 25 organi-sations selected provided a variety of services, ranging from subsidy allocation and the dissemination of public information to the conducting of examinations. In addition to investigating customer orientation in the organisations themselves, the Court of Audit also surveyed the customers of 17 among them in order to assess whether they were satisfied with the services provided.
Customer orientation includes a responsive and service-oriented approach.
Organisations act responsively by taking account of the desires, needs, and complaints of their customers. And they act in a service-oriented way by pursuing policies and taking measures to improve the quality of their services. The mark of a customer-oriented organisation is not that all its customers are satisfied, but that it makes optimum use of information from those customers to enable it to continue improving its services as far as possible. Ideally, customer orientation should be part of a system of quality assurance, interlinking all the elements that determine service quality. This ensures a continuous process of enhancing and guaranteeing quality.