Managing service

personnel
OBJECTIVES OF INTERNAL MARKETING
Service companies strive to achieve customer satisfaction through employee
satisfaction. Christian Grönroos suggested two internal marketing objectives. They
are:
▶ To ensure that the employees are motivated for customer-oriented and service-
minded performance and, thus, successfully fulfil the duties as “part-time
marketers” in their interactive marketing tasks
▶ To attract and retain good employees

Employees of service organizations have to stretch their physical or mental skills

to the utmost to deliver quality service. This is why they are called “emotional
labour.” They are also known as “boundary spanners” because they operate at
the boundary of the organization. They have to interact with external as well as
internal environment.
 
ROLES OF A SERVICE EMPLOYEE
Service employees are required to perform a variety of roles in a service orga- nization. Employees
who are involved in the service production process need to perform the following roles effectively
(see Fig. 16.1):
 Product Designer: Service employees should ascertain each customer’s specific service
requirements and design a distinctive service product by taking into consideration the resources
and competencies of the service organization.
 Performer: Service employees are the performers in the service production process. They have to
interact with uncontrollable elements and extract quality performance by influencing the
customers to get involved in the process.
 Technician: Some services require the use of equipment and tools.
 Associate: Service employees and service consumers together produce service. The expected role
of an employee is to associate with the consumer and produce quality service.
 Friend: Co-employees and customers look for help, cooperation, guidance and support from
others on various issues. Every employee of the service organization should respond to such
needs positively.
  Empathizer: Service consumers feel comfortable and perceive better quality when contact employees are
empathetic. Service employees should have the patience and inclination to be empathetic towards customers.

 Assurer: As services are intangible, variable and perishable, customers seek assurance in every production
process. For the consumer, contact employees are the representatives of the service company. This is why a
contact employee needs to perform the role of an assurer.

 Salesman: Contact employees will have an opportunity to interact closely and intimately with customers.
Therefore, their role in influencing and persuading the customers to buy other services of the company is vital.

 Marketing Intelligence: They are the right personnel to assess response of the customers on company policies
and quality specifications. The feedback from contact employees proves to be very valuable.

 Researcher: Innovation is the key to success in service business. Employees, with their continuous involvement
in work and interactive experience with varied customers, with a distinctive knowledge base, are capable of
bringing innovation in work. There is a lot of scope to exploit the creativity of employees in service business.
 
 STRATEGIES FOR INTERNAL MARKETING
Internal marketing is a philosophy of managing personnel and developing and enhancing a service
culture systematically

1. Staffing
A proper assessment of what kind of people are required and how many is the starting point in human resource
policy of any service organization. The three important issues in staffing are manpower planning, recruitment
and selection.
• Manpower Planning: In service business, manpower often becomes the core competence for companies. To
build the organization with competent personnel, it is necessary to have a proper manpower planning. Besides
planning the right size of employment at various service points, manpower planning ensures that the right
people occupy positions
• Recruitment: In order to get the right people, organizations should know who the best people are, where they
are available and then compete with other organizations to hire them
• Selection: Internal marketing is aimed at attracting, retaining, and motivating “service-minded,” “customer-
conscious” employees capable of generating customer-perceived service quality and provide competitive
advantage
 2. TRAINING
Service firms may have a training system and infrastructure or may hire a specialist organization for its
training needs. Training employees on relevant aspects is an absolute necessity for service firms. The
training programme should aim at basically three important skills for employees. They are

 Technical skills relating to job specification and expected role performances.

 Interactive skills relating to providing courteous, caring, responsive and empathetic service. It includes
communication, listening, problem- solving and interpersonal skills.
 Social skills relating to building personal relationships and recognizing and treating regular customers
differently
3. ORGANIZING
Employees of service organizations need to be organized properly to achieve better results. The
following are the four important dimensions of organizing employees:
• Work Assignment: The qualities, qualifications and interests of the employee have to be
thoroughly assessed before assigning a service job. A wrong assignment
not only makes the service a failure, but also causes loss of customers.
• Empowerment: According to V. A. Zeithaml and M. J. Bitner16, “Empowerment means giving
employees the desired skills, tools and authority to serve the customer.”. It involves enabling
employees to recognize their own power and the significance of their role in the service process.
Delegation of authority is the key factor in empowerment.
• Service Culture: Culture is a broad term that reflects the norms and values of a society, which
give the members of the organization meaning and provide them with the rules for behavior in
the organization.
• Team work: Team work reduces the stress and strain of individual employees and helps them to
maintain enthusiasm in work. Team work, therefore, should be developed and promoted
4. SUPPORTING
Service employees need support systems to be efficient and effective in their
jobs. If everybody strives to provide their “internal customer” with better
service, then the end customer will receive higher quality service.
• Technical support: support of technology, equipment's, tools, machines, other
tangibles and systems provided to the employees not only increase speed and
accuracy but also provide comfort and convenience in service performance.
• Process Support: Secretarial assistance, documents, information net- working,
communication system, mobility, scheduling and routing, influence the
performance of employees and customers in the service process.
5. MOTIVATING
There are two important issues the management has to take care of particularly in motivating
employees: promotions and treating employees as customers.
• Promotions: All employees look for improvement in rank within an appropriate time span of
their career. If an organization does not provide opportunities to move forward in their careers,
employees get frustrated and demotivated. If they find opportunity elsewhere, they quit the
organization
• Treating Employees as Customers: When employees are considered important by the
management which understand their needs and wants and offer value satisfaction, employees are
more likely to stay with the organization. An organization can become the best place to work if
the following four important principles are followed:
a. Treating employees as customers,
b. Involving employees in decision making,
c. Ensuring employee satisfaction benchmarking and
d. Incorporating the best practices of human resource management.
6. EVALUATING
Evaluation of performance of the employees is vital in internal marketing. It is necessary
to develop systems that measure the performance of the employees.

• Measuring Performance: Service firms need to develop an acceptable methodology

for measuring the performance of employees. The measures should help employees
know their level of performance so that they can plan for further improvement

• Feedback to Management: Management of service firms should collect feedback on

employee performance regularly for several purposes. The feedback helps the
management identify areas for improvement, defects and deviations from the quality
specifications and initiate appropriate corrective action.
• Feedback to Employees: Corrective actions can then be initiated when something is not
in the order. A survey by internal employees, customer feedback surveys and so on are
useful in designing and evaluating the system.
7. REWARDING
One of the prime concerns of any employee is the reward that he or she gets for the
service rendered to the organization. The rewarding system primarily should contain
the following three dimensions to be effective in service business:
• Competitive Compensation: The compensation offered to service per- sonnel—
brokerage, salary, commission or wages—should be competitive. During the
software boom of the 1990s, soft- ware companies faced a severe threat of
employee turnover. The only approach that helped organizations retain software
experts was a com- petitive compensation policy.
• Extended Benefits: Besides direct compensation, service firms provide extended
benefits to the employees. The extended benefits include employee welfare
measures within the organization, employee family welfare measures, employee
children education, functions and social interaction.
• Payment for Excellence: A rewarding system, to be effective, should be capable
of identifying the best performers and rewarding them to the level of their
excellence.
8. RETAINING
Hiring the right people is the beginning of a human resource policy. Retain- ing
them is the real essence of the policy. When experienced and efficient personnel
move out of the service organization, the reputation, image and performance of the
company suffer. Service companies have to develop the following strategies to
retain employees.
• Inclusion in the Company Vision: This step helps employees relate their personal
goals with organizational goals. They try to share an understanding of the
organization’s vision. They feel motivated and committed to the organization.
• Retaining the Best Employees: It is important to retain the best employees and
keep away unwanted employees. The employee retention strategy is applicable
only to the best performers.
CUSTOMER ROLE IN SERVICE DELIVERY
• Services are actions or performances, typically produced and consumed
simultaneously. As the customers receiving the service participates in the
service delivery process. He or she can contribute to the gap through
appropriate or inappropriate, effective or ineffective, productive or
unproductive behaviors.

• Customers who are unprepared in terms of what they want to order can
soak up the customer service representative’s time as they seek advice.

• Similarly, shoppers who are not prepared with their credit cards can “put
the representative on hold”. While they search for their credit cards or go
to another room or even out of their cars to get them. Meanwhile, other
customers and calls are left unattended, causing longer wait times and
potential dissatisfaction.
CUSTOMERS ROLE
• The following three major roles played by customers in service co-creation and delivery
are:
1. Customers as a productive process
Service customers are referred to as “partial employees” of the organization. They are
human resources who contribute to the organization’s productive capacity. In other words, if
customers contribute effort, time or other resources to the service production process, they
should be considered as part of the organization.
Customer inputs can affect the organization’s productivity through both quality and quantity
of output. E.g. research suggest that in an IT consulting context:
• Clients who clearly articulate the solution they desire.
• Provide needed information in a timely manner.
• Communicate openly.
• Gain the commitment of key internal stakeholders.
• And raise the issues during the process before it is too late will get better service.
2. Customers as quality contributors to service delivery and satisfaction
Another role customers play in service delivery is that of the contributor to
their own satisfaction and the ultimate quality of the services they receive.
Effective customer participation can increase the likelihood of service delivery
that their needs are met and that benefits the customer seeks are attained.
Services such as health care, education, personal fitness, and weight loss,
where the service outcome is highly dependent on the customers participation.
In such services unless the customers perform their roles effectively, the
desired service outcomes cannot be achieved.
• Research has shown that in education, active participation by students — as
opposed to passive listening — increases learning the desired service output
significantly.
3. Customers as Competitors
A final role played by service customers is that of a potential competitor. They can
partially perform the service or the entire service for themselves and may not need
the provider at all.

Customers thus in that sense are competitors of the companies that supply the
service. Whether to produce a service for themselves (internal exchange). E.g.
child care, home maintenance i.e. have someone else provide home services for
them (external exchange) is a common dilemma for consumers.
Thank you