The dissertation work is devoted to the development of theoretical and methodological provisions and practical recommendations for improving the efficiency of managing the quality of passenger transportation services on railway transport.
The conducted analysis of the theoretical approaches of domestic and foreign scientists to the definition of the categories "quality" and "service" provided an opportunity to formulate the author's definition of the category "quality of passenger transportation services by rail."
The national and international standards that define the concept of quality and norms of its evaluation are considered. Taking into account the importance of quality standards for the effective functioning of society and business, it has been proven that their improvement can be of great practical importance for the development and increase of competitiveness of various sectors of the economy, in particular, railway transport. It was revealed that today Ukraine does not have a national standard that would include: basic requirements and recommendations for a unified system for assessing the quality of rail passenger transport services; service quality indicator system; established basic requirements for service quality, passenger safety, and transportation efficiency.
A classification of indicators of the quality of passenger transportation services by railway transport is proposed, which will allow a comprehensive assessment of the quality of service at different stages of the trip - before the trip, during the trip and after the trip, and take into account the needs and expectations of passengers for further improvement of the service quality management system.
Practical recommendations have been developed for the formation and implementation of a quality management system for passenger transportation services, which implements a fundamentally new scheme of interaction of elements in the provision of services, in which resources (personnel, material, financial, information, innovation), means, tools and processes are connected together. the implementation of which results in a quality transport service. The system of managing the quality of passenger transport services is focused on meeting the expectations of passengers from the transport process while simultaneously taking into account the economic interests of railway transport.
Methodical bases of managing the quality of passenger transport services on railway transport have been studied, which allow to obtain a comprehensive assessment of the quality of services at all stages of their provision - before the trip, during the trip and after the trip, to identify problems in this field and to develop effective management solutions to improve the quality of services for increasing the socio-economic efficiency of railway transport.
The current state and structure of the passenger transport market, modern problems of the development of passenger transport are studied.
The results of a marketing research on the assessment of the quality of passenger transport services on railway transport by the questionnaire method are given, and the degree of satisfaction of passengers with the organization of railway transport is also determined.
A questionnaire template has been developed for railway passengers to fill out, which will not take a lot of the passenger's time and will provide complete information about the degree of his satisfaction and the prerequisites for solving existing problems with quality service. The results of the approbation of the proposed methodology are presented on the example of the "Passenger Company" branch of JSC "Ukrzaliznytsia". According to the results of the conducted sociological research, it was found out which category of passengers is most dissatisfied with the quality of transportation of the "Passenger Company" branch of JSC "Ukrzaliznytsia" and in which aspects.
It is proposed to carry out an assessment of consumer preferences on an ongoing basis with the aim of forming customer-oriented railway services, which is one of the main directions, which allows to assess the impact of service quality on profitability, cost-effectiveness, labor productivity, turnover of working capital, capital return, to identify sub-criteria that have the greatest impact and to conduct a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the management decisions taken to improve the quality of service in railway transport.
A modified methodology for assessing the quality of passenger transportation services by rail has been developed and proposed. Peculiarities of assessing the quality of services at three key stages are considered: before the trip, during the trip and after the trip, in particular taking into account the specifics of railway transport. An integral indicator has been defined that reflects the general level of passenger service quality at all stages.
