A Scale Development For Measuring Internal Service Quality

It was at 1980s that the concept of the internal service quality has been brought forward. Many foreign scholars have done a lot of useful attempt on researching the measurement of the internal service quality. But there is still not an agreement on using which method to measure the internal service quality. Because there's only a few of research in this field in our country, most of the existing internal service quality scales are developed by foreign scholars based on foreign samples. Because of the differences of the culture, the economy environment and so on between China and foreign countries, it's doubtful to use those scales in our companies. Furthermore, there're also some faultinesses in the scale developed by our country's scholar. So it's necessary to develop a new internal service quality measuring scale based on our company's internal operating environment.On the basis of consulting abundant correlative literatures in service quality, measuring models of service quality and internal marketing, this research uses the traditional measuring instrument of external service quality to measure the internal service quality. Dependent on dimensions presented in SERVQUAL advanced by Parasuramant et al, and dimensions in other relative researching models, this research has concluded the preliminary items through literature review and deep interview and so on. After pretesting, the questionnaire for the study has been designed finally.By investigating and analyzing the status of internal service quality in finance company, the practical application of the measuring system presented in this paper for weighing the internal service quality has been qualified by exploring the main composing dimensions that influence the internal service quality and carrying out the demonstration research of the corresponding items. The statistical checkout and analysis of the returned valid questionnaires have approved the applicability and reliability of the model. The result shows this scale can be used to measure the company's internal service quality status.This paper develops the influence degree—internal service quality matrix according to the influences of all the dimensions in the scale relative to the scores of the total internal service quality that the employees have estimated. We hope the company can work out strategies that have much more pertinence to improve its internal service quality by analyzing this matrix. Besides the breaking points, there are also some limitations exiting in the paper. The researcher hopes that the paper will be used for reference for future researches.