Internal Customer Service Quality Measurement

Since entering the new century, marketing theories have gradually become localized with the broad spreading of western marketing theories and the constant practicing activities in China. Many scholars at home and abroad have done lots of useful attempts in the theories relative to internal marketing, especially internal service quality, .which is the core of internal marketing. However, complete and systematic research into internal service quality under internal marketing environment is deficient. So in order to help corporations know clearly how to improve internal service quality and win competing advantages, currently, it is necessary to carry out a deep study to find out the dominants of internal customers' service quality and turn up a scientific and practical measuring system for internal service quality. This research just probes into this aspect and tries to make a break-through.On the basis of consulting abundant correlative literatures in internal marketing, service marketing and measuring models of service quality, this research ameliorated the traditional measuring instrument for external service quality, and use it to measure the internal service quality. Dependent on dimensions presented in SERVQUAL advanced by Parasuraman et al, and dimensions in other relative researching models, this research has concluded the preliminary items through deep interview and focus-group discussion, and so on. After pretesting, the questionnaire for the study has been designed finally.The practical application of the measuring system presented in this paper for weighing internal service quality has been qualified by exploring the main composing dimensions that influence the internal customers' 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, demonstrated the main influential factors of internal service quality and their importance degrees, and developed a multi-dimensioned scale which is suitable for corporations' internal service quality measurement.Finally, the paper has expatiated the significance of the research, and also indicated the right direction for corporations' developing internal marketing service and improving internal service, quality. Corporations can take the paper as a reasonable decision-making base when they make internal marketing strategies. Besides the breaking points, there are also some limitations existing in the paper. The researcher hopes that the paper is meaningful and will be used for reference for future research.