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.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:8277 |
Date | 31 March 2009 |
Creators | Naidoo, Logantheran Perumall |
Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Thesis |
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