Week 7 - Service employees

Question 1

What is a Jaycustomer?

Answer 1

A customer who misbehave in a thoughtless or deliberate manner
- Frontline staff have to deal with them and be adaptable enough to responds to their behaviour

Question 2

What is the role of the employee?

Answer 2

• They are the brand
• They are the service
• They are the markers
• They are part of the tangibles that represent the company

Question 3

What is internal marketing?

Answer 3

This suggests that we look at employees as internal customers, meaning we need to treat employees as customers
- This means they are more likely to stay, be loyal and so learn the skills that then lead to customer loyalty and satisfaction

Question 4

What does Leonard Berry 1976 say the purpose of IM is?

Answer 4

To create customer conscious employees in order to achieve service quality excellence

Question 5

According to Ueno,2010, what does IM consist of?

Consists of 12 overall

Answer 5

• Recruitment and selection
• Training
• Teamwork
• Empowerment - performance measurement and reward system
• Employees commitment and involvement

Question 6

What is the impact of Internal marketing?

Answer 6

• Creates good coordination and cooperation among departments
• Encourages employees to offer superior service
• Retaining positive customer experiences

Question 7

Who came up with IM and when was it?

Answer 7

• from the 1970’s services marketing literature

- was pioneered by Leonard Berry (Berry et al., 1976

Question 8

What is service marketing orientation?

Answer 8

• a managerial approach to ensure customer satisfaction through first fulfilling the needs of the employee (Berry et al., 1976).

Question 9

What is a firms corporate image?

Answer 9

• How the company is perceived by the consumer and can be shaped by the organisation through its branding, employees, symbols and retail Servicescape (Melewar & Jenkins, 2002; Joanna et al., 2011).

Question 10

How do Internal Marketers recruit employees?

Answer 10

• They hire candidates that fit the core values and cultures and train everyone up to find their position in the company rather than overlooking the
• Have low staff turnover because they train and reward staff regularly.
• May be flexible

Question 11

What are the three promise relating activities for maintaining service relationships identified by Bitner in 1985?

Answer 11

1) Making promises through external marketing;
2) Enabling promises through internal marketing
3) Keeping promises through interactive marketing.

Question 12

How can companies enable the promises?

Answer 12

Empowerment

Question 13

Whats included in empowerment?

Answer 13

• Flexibility with employees being able to make decisions on the front line
• Engaging them so they are involved with the plans and know whats going on

Question 14

What are the advantages of employee empowerment?

Bowen and Lawler

Answer 14

• Employees respond more quickly to customer needs during the service delivery
• Employees are more satisfied with their jobs and themselves
• Employees will interact more warmly and enthusiastically with customers

Question 15

What is enfranchisement?

Answer 15

Couples empowerment with a compensation method that pays people for their performance

Question 16

What are the disadvantages of empowering employees?

Answer 16

• have to spend more time and money on training and recruitment
• Employees might demonstrate poor judgement or exceed reasonable standards to satisfy customer needs
• Negative perceptions of fairness from customers

Question 17

Whats involved in high level empowerment?

Answer 17

Train people to manage themselves
Profit-sharing and employee ownership e.g Co-ops
Develop skills in teamwork, problem solving, and business operations

Question 18

Whats involved in job involvement?

Answer 18

Opening up of job content

Use more skills, more freedom, and get more feedback

Extensive use of teams

Higher level decisions and reward allocation remain the responsibility of senior management

Question 19

What is the service profit chain?

Answer 19

This is the logical process that ensures satisfied employees provide excellent customer service which leads to bottom-line profit

Question 20

Whats included in the internal service quality?

Answer 20

• Workplace design
• Employee selection and development
• Job design e.g empowerment
• Tools for serving the customer

Question 21

What does internal marketing suggest? (Long quote)

Answer 21

Internal Marketing suggest front contact or frontline employees are internal customers representing a company’s corporate brand image and that they enable and facilitate external marketing promises when they interact with customers as brand touch points in a company’s Servicescape (Varey, 1995; Gounaris, 2008)

Question 22

What is a service marketing orientation?

Answer 22

A service marketing orientation is considered to be a managerial approach to ensure customer satisfaction through first fulfilling the needs of the employee (Berry et al., 1976)

Question 23

What has the promise concept been referred to as in services?

Answer 23

The ‘promise’ concept, has been identified in the service marketing literature as being key to service relationships (Gronroos, 2009).

Question 24

What is said to enhance customer satisfaction within Bitners promise concept ?

Answer 24

It is this keeping of promises during the interaction stage that is said to be the key to enhancing customer satisfaction (Calonius, 2006).