The effects of communication on quality of services offered by public transport companies: Case study :Rwanda

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of communication on quality of service offered by public transport in Rwanda. The problem statement was emphasizing on the improvement of an effective communication between public transport service users and public transport service providers, based on the passenger‘s complaints there are still some problems faced by researcher in both public transport service delivery and communication which are still needed to be addressed in this research. Research questions was built on research objectives which are to identify communication channels used by travel agencies in Rwanda; to evaluate the effectiveness of communication channels used by those travel agencies; to evaluate communication skills of drivers, customer care staff and their managers; to evaluate the quality of transport services provided by those travel agencies; to determine whether there is a close relationship between communication and quality of transport services. Stratified sampling technique was used to select a sample size of 271 respondents including Managers (29), Customer care staff (98), Drivers (99) and Passengers (45) from target population of 17946 respondents including (11220 Drivers, 6603 Customer care staff, 41 Managers and 82 passengers) and the method of Yamane (1967) sampling formula was used to determine the sample size. According to the purposes of the study, data were primarily collected by using the questionnaires and data cleaning, data Analysis was done by using SPSS and chi-squire statistical test was used to test the relationship between independent and dependent variables. Based on the research findings as it was indicated in chapter 4, the research findings was discovered that transport companies need to apply and to improve the communication effectiveness and efficiency as one of the factors affecting both the quality of service delivery of public transport in Rwanda and the passengers satisfaction. It was observed that capacity building intervention about communication skills and quality of service delivery for public transport staff is needed to be done on regular basis and enhancement of public transport equipment to comfort passengers while traveling. The recommendations of this research will contribute to the National Strategies for transformation and other National strategies concerned to Public Transport in Rwanda.