Quality of Service and Process Efficiency at Immigration Points: a Case of Busia and Malaba Border Posts

Abstract

Service quality has been recognized as a major ingredient in the success of organizations hence how they manage their service operations would eventually determine how they performs in terms of efficiency. With good quality services offered to the customers the organizations will have satisfied the customer needs hence this will eventually translate to improved consumption of the products offered thus improved revenues would mean that processes are efficient. The general rise in global trade has meant that there is a lot of border movement hence the need of efficient clearance processes is seen as instrumental to the success of this. With no known study that has tried to look at the correlation of the quality of services offered at the border points of Malaba and Busia to the performance of the processes which is efficiency this study was seen relevant to help in finding out this. The study analyzed the services offered and tried to establish their relationship to the efficiency of the processes in terms of the volumes processed and the time used in the processes. The study used a case study and primary and secondary data was collected where by questionnaires were used to collect primary data and the contents were analyzed qualitatively and inferences were drawn to deduce the outcomes. The outcomes were regresses to establish whether there exists a correlation between the variables that were established. The findings gave an insight of the relationships of the quality of services to the performance of the processes at the border points. It shows that improvement in the quality of services in terms of the delivery processes helped to improve the performances in terms of the processes efficiency. Though some challenges were realized in terms of the implementation of the processes which could have affected the way some consumers perceive the services, it was concluded that with proper stakeholder involvement in developing the services the success rate can be improved. Hence the recommendations were that there should be constant improvement of the services by constantly analyzing the needs in the environment and also fully involve stakeholders in the processes of developing the services. Therefore generally it was concluded that quality of service has a positive relationship to the processes efficiency.