| The competitiveness is not a concept only reserved for private service firms. The present conditions have done that public sector organizations look for greater levels of efficiency in their managements, taking as a key objective the customer oriented – reputation. For the universities as education institution, the requirements and demands for better in terms of greater quality and better educative students training are increasing constantly. These reasons make of special strategic interest the study and creation of tools that support the decision making. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a model of customer orientation in public services that allows us to obtain a better knowledge of the assessment process customer makes. In this university context, it is said to be the students as customer and universities as the service provider. The model will be developed confirming the causal relationships between the following latent variables: brand image, perceived quality, perceived value, satisfaction, and customer-oriented reputation. To empirically contrast the model with public services – universities, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) methodology is used with data collected from students of four private universities located in Jakarta, consist of Atma Jaya, Bina Nusantara, Trisakti, and YAI. The findings support interesting impact such as the perceived quality positively affects perceived value by 0,689; the positive effects of perceived quality and perceived value result on satisfaction as 0,851 and 0,516; the positive total and direct effect of perceived value on the university reputation is resulted as 0,716; till finally the positive total effects impacted by perceived quality on institution’s reputation results as 0,577. |