Service quality between internal customers and internal suppliers in an international airline

Abstract

Over the past decade, SERVQUAL has emerged as perhaps the most popular standardized questionnaire to measure service quality. In this study, a conceptual model, INTSERVQUAL, was designed based on the original “Gap Model”, to explore the extent to which the construct service quality plays in an internal marketing setting. The research was conducted in a major international airline. The expectations and perceptions scales have emerged as measures with excellent internal consistency reliabilities. The two scales exhibited adequate validity as separate measures of front‐line staff (customer‐contact personnel) expectations of support services; and their perceptions of the support staff’s performance. The results indicated that the scales can be successfully used to assess the magnitude of the gap between front‐line staff perceptions and expectations.

Internal service quality and job satisfaction synergies for performance improvement: Some evidence from a B2B environment

“…Others suggest that it is appropriate to measure internal service quality by using techniques and instruments developed to measure external service quality, taking into consideration the differences between internal and external customers. In any case, SERVQUAL ' s usefulness for measuring internal service quality is almost universally accepted 20,21 by modifying its items to measure employee perceptions (INTSERVQUAL, Frost and Kumar 18 ) in addition to, however, certain considerations regarding the confi rmation of the instrument ' s dimensionality. 18,20 -24 …”

“…Researchers have measured internal service quality in various customer-service settings, including hospitals, 24,37 banks, 38,39 hotels, 23 airlines, 18 manufactories, 40 telecommunications, 41 insurance fi rms, 42 entertainment and gaming complexes, 43 computer services companies, 20 and universities, 21 reporting, however, different dimensions from the original SERVQUAL instrument . Moreover, only one of these studies 44 evaluated internal service quality in a B2B environment.…”

“…First, it introduces INTSERVQUAL as an alternative to TQM and the ISO series in capturing the human aspect and people orientation within organisations. Furthermore, it assesses the applicability of the INTSERVQUAL instrument, as introduced by Frost and Kumar, 18 as a tool for measuring internal service quality in a business-to-business (B2B) setting. Second, it introduces business performance, which is regarded as a transformation process, in which the ends (sales rate) may be the interactive outcome of the job satisfaction infl uenced by internal service quality.…”

The relationship between internal and external service quality

“…A number of studies have actually employed SERVQUAL in order to measure internal service quality (Boshoff and Mels, 1995;Frost and Kumar, 2001;Kang et al, 2002;Sánchez-Rodríguez and Martínez-Lorente, 2004;White and Rudall, 1999). Other researchers regard the measurement of internal service quality as being too complex a task to implement by merely adapting existing instruments from external customer research (Finn et al, 1996;Marshall et al, 1998;Vandermerwe and Gildert, 1991).…”

Employees’ perspectives of service quality in hotels

“…LODGSERV (Knutson et al, 1990) and HOLSERV (Wong Ooi Mei, Dean, & White, 1999) are used in the accommodation industry, while DINESERV (Stevens, Knutson, & Patton, 1995) is used in the restaurant services sector. INTQUAL (Caruana & Pitt, 1997) and INTERSERVQUAL (Frost & Kumar, 2001) are used in service quality perceptions of employees. CASERV (Wong & Fong, 2012) is used for casino customers.…”