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Abstract: Maintaining an adequate level of services becomes a particularly difficult challenge in the current conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, which greatly complicates the organization and implementation of tasks assigned to public entities. Therefore, it was deemed important to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, considered in the context of global risk, on the quality of customer service in the local government units. In the theoretical part, the investigations presented in this study contain a discussion of public service provision by local government units. The publication includes a study of the concepts of quality and satisfaction. The article also draws attention to the aspect of risk as an indispensable element of business entities in relation to the global risk caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The empirical part presents the results of surveys conducted using the Servqual method and the Kruskal-Wallis test. In conclusion, providing high-quality services is a challenge for many local government units. The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected the dimensions of reliability and trust that make up the quality of customer service in local government units. This is evidenced by the results which show the deterioration of the quality of customer service during the pandemic. The current situation exacerbates the negative trend resulting from the gap between the perception of the services provided and the actual requirements of the respondents.
Keywords Wallis test, local government, public management, quality of customer service, Servqual method.
JEL: H75, H79, I18,
Introduction
Every human activity has risks that can be determined with varying degrees of predictability. Its intensity and variability are also different (Wielgórka, 2016). Dynamic globalization processes and political transformation are the main determinants influencing the standards of functioning in the economy and, consequently, the level of risk (Hussain et al., 2021). The intensity of transformations in the socioeconomic sphere also leads to changes in the activity of the public sector units (Dankiewicz et al., 2020). In relation to the public sector, there is a belief that it operates in a stable and predictable environment. And the risks occurring in the course of its activities reach a low level. However, the aforementioned categorization is largely blurred over time. Therefore, risks in the private sector also affect public entities (Grabowska & Otola, 2015). A special...