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Top1. Introduction
Quality of e-service is one of the most significant factors that play a major role in the success or failure of online organizations. Organizations invest heavily in providing online services to customers in order to enhance their competitive advantages, improve relationships with clients and increase satisfactions. The clear potential of utilizing ICT in government services has led many governments to make great investments in ICT (Chohan and Hu, 2020).
E-government is the application of ICT used by governments to generate a comfortable, transparent and less costly environment for interacting with citizens (Ullah et al, 2021). Worldwide, governments are upgrading their procedures for remodelling their services to provide online public services (Sharma et al, 2018). Offering e-governmental services by countries provides many advantages to citizens. Less frustration, effort, money and time wasted in face to face government services are at the top of the list that make e-government portals a more convenient option (Samsor, 2020). Those facts encouraged governments worldwide to try and provide efficient and effective service to a number of stakeholders (Sharma et al, 2018).
Recently, the importance of e-services and specifically e-government has increased even more after the pandemic period of Covid-19 experienced worldwide (Dawi, N. et al, 2021). When face-to-face interaction became very limited and nearly unavailable, e-government solutions become more vital. Thus, e-government services turned to become a necessity rather than a luxury. However, users are still uncertain and suspicious towards the use of e- government services (Sharma et al, 2018). The quality of the service offered through e-government websites plays an important role and could even be considered a constraint regarding citizen’s intention to use (Qalati, S. et al, 2021). This brings in motivation to investigate the perceptions of e-service quality from user’s perspectives.
Although e-service quality has been extensively referred to in literature, governments seem to take few steps towards understating the main factors that affect customer satisfaction (Pakurár et al, 2019). Governments have clearly increased the provision of e-services to citizens, regardless of the quality level of the service provided. Studies state that although governments have made obvious initiatives, the service quality level still remains inadequate, and the most needed features are not well-provided (Li and Shang, 2020; Al-Nidawi et al, 2018; Sharma, 2015). Although users’ perceptions of the dimensions determining e-service quality have been the focus of a number of studies, (Li and Shang, 2020; Camilleri, 2019; Rita et al, 2019), to the best of the authors knowledge, the mediating and moderating factors that affect customer satisfaction were not reviewed in literature. Not to mention the negligible knowledge of customers’ perception, especially within an extraordinary context; namely the pandemic. This brings a calling need to study the factors that influence customer satisfaction on e-government websites.
Accordingly, the study at hand is needed in order to investigate the key e-government service quality dimensions affecting customer satisfaction while understanding the mediating and moderating factors that affect customer satisfaction in e-government services. The study is expected to help decision makers at governmental agencies make informed decisions, and contribute to leveraging the decision makers’ awareness. Thus, it paves the road towards high usage rates of e-government services, which provides citizens with a more useful and a reliable option. This should in turn help governments have a competitive advantage, satisfy their citizens, and maintain better relationships with them. In order to achieve the research aim, the study seeks to answer the following research questions: