When internal marketing is the key performance of the service experience

Bellaouaied, Myriam

Abstract

Service companies are tackling challenges every day. The service organization must take the right decision even in the most critical situations. Marketing is dealing with these situations and challenges, keeping the service performance through the customer satisfaction, a priority. Focusing on the human capital development (Baran 2021) and the key concepts of human resources (Pocztowski 2018) became a priority since services’ employees are connecting the internal environment of an organization to the external world, while being responsible for these two parts (Agnihotri et al. 2014). These thoughts brought a new marketing orientation that is the Internal Marketing (IM). Indeed, it seems important to study the bearer of the message and the image of the service company that is the service employees, having sometimes more focus on the frontline staff. Considering that the role of "frontline service personnel", has become a differentiating element, this research therefore considers the IM as an alternative to the service performance and examines the relationships among Internal Marketing, Frontline service employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. The study also, attempts to conceptualize and develop a measurement scale of the “Internal Marketing” concept.
The concept of internal marketing and its measurements are investigated in this research; qualitative and quantitative analysis are combined to accomplish the objective of the study. Thus, the recommendations of Churchill (1979) revised by Gerbing and Anderson (1988) are followed. In this research, a dyadic analysis is applied to test relationships between variables from different populations, having regular contact: Bank advisors and their customers. Thinking that contact employee satisfaction can be expressed through several aspects of the job, we used the scale of Weiss et al., (1967), the short version of the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ). Customer satisfaction was measured through the scale of Oliver (1997). A two-dimensional measuring scale with 9 items was developed and validated in the context of financial service sector.
This research serves several theoretical interests, first it offers a wide reliable and valid measure to fill the gaps in the current literature on the internal marketing. Existing scales do not fully capture the different dimensions of IM concept. This research goes further with the question of whether internal marketing, through gratitude and mentoring dimensions, impacts the service frontline staff providing customer satisfaction. Future research studies and limitation are mentioned here. The internal marketing scale developed and tested in the French financial context needs to be further validated and confirmed in other contexts; this could be a path for future research.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Academy of Marketing Science 2023 Annual Conference
• Start Date: May 17, 2023
• End Date: May 19, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Jan 6, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 13, 2024
• Book Title: 2023 Annual Conference Abstracts
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/12044577
• Publisher URL: https://member.ams-web.org/page/ConferenceProceeding