“Unbearable Care”: Why does the Government's Door-to-door Service Cause Public Dissatisfaction?

The construction of a people-centred service-oriented government is driving the mode of public service provision from passive response to proactive service. Governments around the world have adopted a proactive stance of proactive services to bear most of the administrative costs of the public, yet not all proactive government services improve public satisfaction. The field study found that when the government provides door-to-door services such as home care and welfare accreditation it incurs widespread public complaints. Why does the government's proactive provision of door-to-door services lead to public dissatisfaction? This paradox becomes the starting point of this paper. Existing studies have mainly discussed the evaluation of public satisfaction in general service scenarios and lacked analyses of public satisfaction in door-to-door service scenarios. This paper reduces people's negative service evaluations to negative public service experiences, and constructs an analytical framework for the paradox of door-to-door service satisfaction from the dimensions of service environment and service process. From the perspective of service environment, the government door-to-door service opens up a channel for the administrative system to intervene deeply in the private life field, and when the people's life field becomes the scene of the government's mandatory service, the administrative nature of the public service conflicts with the social nature of the private life, and the people feel a lot of situational pressures while accepting the service; from the perspective of the service process, the government door-to-door service stimulates the people's demand expression by the government's initiative, and the service supply is stimulated by the administrative system. From the perspective of service process, the government door-to-door service also stimulates the expression of people's needs because of the government's initiative, while the service supply is controlled by the administrative system and still follows the uniform standards, which directly leads to the contradiction between the diffuse nature of individual needs and the standardisation of public services, and the door-to-door service provides service supply but fails to meet the people's diversified and individualised needs, and the people are faced with the gap of expectations before and after the service. Situational pressures and expectation gaps lead to negative evaluations of government door-to-door services. This reveals that we should pay attention not only to the supply side of services, but also to the demand side of services, and even more so to the world beyond services. Firstly, the design of public service experience should be strengthened on the basis of cooperation between the government and the people; secondly, the humanistic care in the process of service provision should be enhanced; and lastly, reasonable administrative burdens should be used to reduce individuals' unreasonable expectations of public services. In short, the government should reduce the disruption to people's lives brought about by excessive proactive behaviour and maintain appropriate service “white space”.