Internal marketing is the conceptual process by which managers actively encourage, stimulate, and support employee commitment to the company, the company’s goods and services, and the company’s customers. Emphasis should be placed on continual. Managers, who consistently pitch into help when needed, constantly provide encouragement and words of praise to employees, strive to help employees understand the benefits of performing their jobs well, and emphasize the importance of employee actions on both company and employee results are practitioners of internal marketing. In service marketing, successful internal marketing efforts, leading to employee commitment to service quality, are key to success.
Properly performed customer satisfaction research can yield a wealth of strategic information about customers, the sponsoring company, and competitors. However, service quality goes beyond the relationship between a customer and a company. Rather, it is personal relationship between a customer and the particular employee that the customer happens to be dealing with at the time of the service encounter that ultimately determines service quality. The importance of having customer-oriented, frontline people cannot be overstated. If frontline service personnel are unfriendly, unhelpful, uncooperative, or uninterested in the customer, the customer will tend to project that same attitude to the company as a whole. The character and personality of an organization reflects the character and personality of its top management. Management must develop programs that will stimulate employee commitment to customer service. These programs must contain five critical components:
1) A careful selection process in hiring frontline employees. To do this, management has to clearly define the skills the service person must bring to the job.
2) A clear, concrete message that conveys particular service strategy that frontline people can bring to act on. People delivering service need to know how their work fits in the broader scheme of business operations. They need to have a cause because servicing others is just too demanding and frustrating to be done well each day without one.
3) Significant modeling by managers, that is, managers demonstrating the behavior that they intend to reward employees for performing.
4) An energetic follow-through process, in which managers provide the training, support, and incentives necessary to give the employees the capability and willingness to provide quality service.
5) An emphasis on teaching employees to have good attitudes. This type of training usually focuses on specific social techniques, such as, eye contact, smiling, tone of voice, and standards of dress.
However, organizing and implementing such programs will only lead to temporary results unless managers practice a strategy of internal marketing.
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21st Century Organizational Transformation 