Concept for the Customer Perspective of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) System in Bus Transport Companies in the Slovak Republic.

Customer awareness and customer satisfaction are generally important attributes for the success and competitiveness of any business. In some sectors, they are studied very intensively; in others, they are neglected. In the field of transport services, it is important that the attitudes of customers are sufficiently monitored because public passenger transport has a lot of individual competition. Only satisfied customers can prefer public transportation over their own. In this context, this contribution analyses customer requirements and their satisfaction with bus public transport in the Slovak Republic. The opinions of customers are supplemented in this article with those of strategic managers. We ascertained customer requirements through questionnaire surveys. Using theoretical knowledge, we established hypotheses, which were subsequently verified using the selected statistical methods. Based on the findings, we proposed the concept of the target perspective of the BSC system for bus transport companies in the Slovak Republic in an effort to increase their competitiveness. Our procedure was also based on knowledge that is the output of various research studies in this area. Their results show that marketing strategies are considered the most important part of strategic management. Today, it is common in many industries that all business entities offer the same product at the same price under approximately the same technological conditions and with the assistance of equally well-equipped personnel. Therefore, a correctly set marketing strategy can also be the key to business success in transport services. The methods used in this paper were analysis, synthesis, questionnaire surveys, and the selected managerial and statistical methods. Our goal was to propose a concept of the customer perspective of the BSC system based on the analysis of customer requirements. We are convinced that the results of our survey can contribute to increasing the competitiveness of not only bus carriers in Slovakia, but also in other EU countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]