Abstract
M.B.A.
Building relationships with various groups of stakeholders is critical to an
organisation’s success. One critical group of stakeholders are the
organisation’s employees – the Internal Market.
Internal Marketing is the key to superior service and the result is external
marketing success. Internal Marketing can be defined as the promoting of the
organisation and its product(s) or product line(s) to the organisation’s
employees. Internal marketing as a term evolves from the notion that
employees constitute an internal market within the organisation. This market
needs to be informed, educated, trained, rewarded and motivated to meet
external customers' needs and expectations.
Understanding customer expectations is a prerequisite for delivering superior
service. In order to achieve customer and organisation alignment, the
organisations have to ensure that their internal processes, systems and
employees are aligned to their common objectives of retaining customers and
delivering superior service.
Internal Marketing (IM) and Customer Service Centre (CSC) employees was
chosen as the subject for this research to determine and establish the nature
and perceptions of internal marketing in the service delivered by the Customer
Service Centre employees from this specific Bank. IM has wide application in
the service sector, but there is little empirical evidence that shows how
Customer Service Centre employees perceive it.
IM comprises of five components. Customer orientation and customer
satisfaction involves leveraging customer relationships and their associated
in-depth customer knowledge, which guides an organisation’s strategy
towards meeting customer objectives. The implementation of specific
corporate or functional strategies relates to the alignment, education and
motivation of employees so that they can deliver on customer expectations,
whilst meeting the organisation’s objectives. Employee motivation and
employee satisfaction relates to attracting, developing, motivating and
retaining qualified employees through job products that satisfy their needs.
Inter-functional co-ordination and integration involves internal cross-functional
relationships or co-operation to deliver effective service to the customers.
The marketing-like approach refers to internal marketing-like activities that
can influence employees to become customer-conscious and marketoriented.
It is critical that employees within an organisation understand their impact and
influence on other employees who are part of the complete value-chain that
renders a service to the customer. This is important as employees within an
organisation provide a service or support to other employees who deliver the
end product or service to the customer.
This study identified the employees’ perceptions of the internal marketing
components within a Customer Service Centre of a leading Bank. The
Customer Service Centre provides first level telephonic support to the Bank’s
employees. This is a key function in order to ensure that all problems are
resolved quickly so that the employees can deliver service to their customers.
This research contains a background to the study, a literature review that was
researched to clearly define and understand IM, it concepts, as well as related
subjects to IM and call centre environments. A survey was then conducted
with the CSC employees and the findings were then analysed and proposed
recommendations were then concluded. The outcomes of the research
identified that four of the five IM components are present in a CSC
environment.