http://directory.umm.ac.id/Journals/Journal%20of%20Operations%20Management/Vol19.Issue3.May2001/241.pdf

Service quality along the supply chain: implications for purchasing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence supporting the view that internal service quality has a direct effect on external service quality.Design/methodology/approach – The study focuses on the restaurant industry in Greece. Waiters are considered as internal customers and kitchen personnel as internal suppliers. Inferential analysis included factor analysis on individual waiter and customer data as well as canonical correlation analysis on a restaurant level.Findings – Factor analysis of external service quality revealed six factors including product, organizational image, safety and choice, empathy, reliability as well as responsiveness. Internal service quality factors, additional to those found in external service quality research, included professionalism and internet. Canonical correlation revealed that the internal service quality dimensions of safety, reliability and internet exert a direct positive influence on the external service quality dimensions of organization...

The relationship between internal and external service quality

An often overlooked aspect of service delivery in business‐to‐business settings is the issue of service quality among internal organizational units. Yet, in practice many organizational departments are service providers primarily to customers within the organization. For example, management information systems, human resources, and purchasing departments all share an important function supporting other employees as they perform their jobs. Managers of those internal service functions are becoming more concerned with delivering high levels of service quality to their internal customers. This article explores the dimensionality of customer service quality as perceived by a set of internal customers of an organizational buying unit, and examines the potential for segmentation of internal customers. Managerial implications and recommendations are presented to aid organizations desiring to improve internal service quality.

Exploring internal customer service quality

This study proposes an evaluation approach on assessing service quality perceptions based on the fuzzy measure and extension of decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (EDEMATEL). This research comprises the perception of two study groups, namely, customers and employees, which include 22 evaluation criteria assessed by two groups from the top four English hotels in Taiwan. The human perception on service quality usually involves in imprecision and vagueness. The triangular fuzzy numbers presents the vagueness and subjectivity information, and use defuzzification method to handle the vagueness linguistic information into a crisp value. This study applies fuzzy set theory and EDEMATEL method to evaluate the interrelationships of service quality evaluation criteria and to compromise the group perceptions into a cause and effect model in uncertainty. The proposed approach is an effective method for assessing the group perceptions, and it integrates the different perceptions into a compromised cause and effect model of hotel service quality in uncertainty. The managerial implications are discussed.

Using the extension of DEMATEL to integrate hotel service quality perceptions into a cause-effect model in uncertainty

Although it has been widely accepted that internal customer service quality leads to internal customer satisfaction and in turn external customer satisfaction, relatively little research has focused on the dimensions of internal customer service quality and their differing impacts on internal customer satisfaction. This empirical study identifies six key internal service quality dimensions as perceived by the purchasing department's internal customers: customer intimacy, team-based continuous improvement, communication, reliability/competence, requisition process and tangibles. In addition, this study reveals the following factors. First, customer intimacy is the most influential dimension to achieve both high internal customer service quality and satisfaction. Second, team-based continuous improvement and requisition process are the second and third most important dimensions of service quality but not significantly associated with internal customer satisfaction. Third, conversely, communication is the se...

Examining the relationships between internal service quality and its dimensions, and internal customer satisfaction

An important tenet of Total Quality Management holds that each employee should treat other organization members with whom she interacts as valued customers. To know if such internal service efforts are successful, managers need a means by which internal service quality can be measured. This exploratory study of internal customers employs marketing research methods that, traditionally, have been applied to final consumers. The setting is the corporate purchasing department of Alcon Laboratories, Inc., a large pharmaceutical manufacturing firm. The ninety-seven participants were all internal customers of the corporate purchasing department. Their jobs ranged from RD and 2) Do they think they are getting it? In answer to the first question, we found six types of service requirements of purchasing’s internal customers. To answer t...

Roy Anderson

Papers

Total Quality Management and Internal Customers: Measuring Internal Service Quality