THE IMPACT OF INTERNAL MARKETING EFFORTS IN DISTRIBUTION SERVICE OPERATIONS

Marketing efforts can offer firms a greater competitive advantage by overtly stimulating the impact of frontline logistics employees on customer value creation. In such a situation, internal marketing becomes the strategy of choice in both service and product support contexts. A broad marketing mix framework is introduced shifting the traditional application from marketing products to marketing the workplace to logistics distribution employees. Research findings support a multidimensional operationalization of internal marketing. Holistic tests indicate that internal marketing on an interpersonal level is associated with satisfied and higher performing distribution center employees and increased interdepartmental customer orientation.     

Factors Contributing to Internal Customer Satisfaction and Commitment in Quick Service Restaurants

Abstract

The fast-paced, highly competitive nature of quick service restaurants (QSRs) has motivated members of the industry to develop creative ways to optimize customer satisfaction. This search for competitive advantage has fueled an increased interest in employees as “internal customers” who are primarily responsible for external customer satisfaction. The hospitality industry is unique in that employees are part of the product; they directly provide the service component. This project surveyed over 900 hourly and salaried employees at 61 QSRs. The results indicate strategies and tactics to maintain satisfied and “actively” as well as “passively” committed employees. In turn these employees may be an employer's greatest marketing tool.     

内部营销与顾客满意关系的实证研究(英文)

为了确定内部营销、员工满意、服务质量和顾客满意之间的因果关系,本文在文献研究的基础上构建了内部营销—员工满意—服务质量—顾客满意关系模型,并以35家商业银行的员工和顾客为实证样本,采用因子分析、回归分析检验了模型的假设关系。     

餐饮企业客户关系管理研究

客户是餐饮企业生存与发展的基础,客户关系管理可以提高餐饮企业的顾客忠诚度。当前,餐饮业客户关系管理还存在着对客户关系管理重视不够,对客户的服务意识不到位,吸引客户的营销手段单调,企业内部组织结构不完善,对企业的价值顾客群判断不准等问题。餐饮企业应利用CRM管理系统,了解顾客,并建立良好客户关系;加强员工培训,提升员工的服务素质;制定合理的价格,维系客户永久关系;树立顾客成本概念,通过提高客户满意度和忠诚度,达到提升客户价值和提升品牌形象的目的,从而实现企业利润最大化。     

我国通信业客户忠诚驱动因素研究

客户忠诚指客户行为的持续性,它对确立企业的核心竞争力具有重要影响。文章认为,客户忠诚是内外部环境因素共同作用的结果。而通讯服务质量、信任、转网成本、员工忠诚是影响通讯业客户忠诚的重要因素。其中,良好的通讯服务质量是维系客户忠诚的保障;信任是客户再购买行为产生的前提;转网成本对通讯业客户忠诚有着不可忽视的影响;员工忠诚有助于客户忠诚的建立。我国通讯运营商要建立客户忠诚,必须以客户导向的营销理念作为企业经营管理的主导思想;加强技术创新,为客户提供全方位的优质服务;与客户之间建立相互信任的合作关系,为长远合作奠定基础;提高转网成本和员工忠诚度,为建立客户忠诚打下坚实的内部基础。     

Long‐Term Oriented Marketing Relationships and Ethical Conduct in Outsourcing Sector

The study evaluates the positive effect of long‐term oriented marketing relationship on ethical conduct from the perspective of the service provider (i.e., the agent‐firm), by integrating the relevant literature from relationship marketing, ethics, and long‐term orientation domains. The paper proposes that service providers that build relationship quality with their clients will display increased ethical conduct toward them. Specifically, the study examines the positive influence of the dimensions of relationship quality (that are relevant to the offshoring services context) that the service provider firm's employees undertake and their impact on ethical conduct. Overall, the results indicate that the commitment‐only full mediation model of relationship marketing variables on ethical conduct is a better representation than both direct‐effects model and other competing mediating models examined in this study. Fundamentally, it means that customer service officers should incorporate long‐term orientation and commitment in their principal–agent relationships that will provide the impetus for undertaking ethical behavior. The article concludes with a discussion and implications of the findings.     

Optimizing service failure and damage control

Should a provider deliver a reliable service or should it allow for occasional service failures? This paper derives conditions under which randomizing service quality can benefit the provider and society. In addition to cost considerations, heterogeneity in customer damages from service failures allows the provider to generate profit from selling damage prevention services or offering compensation to high-damage customers. This strategy is viable even when reputation counts and markets are competitive.     

Referral marketing: Harnessing the power of your customers

The differences between traditional and referral marketing programs are so great that the two share little overlap in terms of appropriate target markets, marketing objectives, marketing organization, and overall planning and implementation strategies. Traditional marketing programs seek advocates among current employees to spread word of mouth, aim marketing efforts at high lifetime-value customers, focus on customer satisfaction, and use promotional programs that heavily rely on social media. In contrast, referral marketing relies on motivating satisfied/delighted customers as a referral base, seeking current customers that can provide referrals with a high lifetime value, using referral-based marketing programs to augment traditional promotions, and developing a compensation system for referrals based on either direct payment or increased visibility. Major advantages of referral marketing programs as compared with traditional marketing programs include greater credibility of friend/family member recommendations over paid advertisements, access to new customers that traditional marketing programs may not reach, and better matching of referred customers’ needs to a good or service. This article presents an eight-step process to develop, implement, and evaluate the success of a referral program. In addition, it discusses academic research findings and presents examples of successful referral program strategies from—among others—Dropbox, Roku, PayPal, Digitalis, and Omaha Steaks.     

客户关系:私有还是共享

本文认为,由于企业自身与外部环境的影响,目前我国的客户关系处于一种私有化状态,使得作为企业整体资源的客户关系无法共享,造成了资源浪费与管理上的困难。考虑到客户关系私有的客观存在性、持久性以及由私有到共享的成本,应依据客户关系共享的成本收益情况,选择是否对其进行共享。文章提出,技术、管理和经济上的不同步是企业在客户关系共享化过程中遇到的一个突出问题,为解决这一问题,应对客户关系信息进行统一规范设计,实施客户关系共享激励政策,对客户关系信息共享设置权限管理,根据需要赋予不同人员不同的使用权限,加强协作式营销,实现客户关系的组织化管理。     

Managing Customer Acquisition Risk Using Co-operative Databases

Acquisition of new customers involves both opportunity and risk, and it is important for firms to predict and manage the risks involved in customer acquisition. Despite its importance, the management of customer acquisition risk has not been the subject of much academic research. This paper develops a framework for firms to manage customer acquisition risk using co-operative databases. We illustrate this framework in the context of the optimal selection of customers for direct mail with a ‘buy now, pay later’ payment option when the acquisition risk manifests as bad debt risk. Using data from a large scale direct marketing campaign, we show that our empirical model that incorporates bad debt risk substantially outperforms suboptimal targeting schemes that overlook bad debt risk. We also demonstrate how alleviating bad debt risk is one beneficial outcome of a fairly recent trend in database marketing, namely the emergence of co-operative databases.     

Service Orientation: Its Impact on Business Performance in the Medical Service Industry

From the viewpoint of internal marketing, employees who are content in their job may be motivated to satisfy their customers better than ones who are not content. Another relevant premise is that the content employees, because of their work motivation, would eventually help improve the performance of their firm. To verify these relationships, some previous studies looked into the effects of organisational service orientation on employee's satisfaction. But only few of them investigated the mediating effects of variables such as service value and customer orientation for their role in linking service orientation to business performance. This study examines how an organisation's service orientation had an effect on its performance at hospitals. For this purpose, verification of the mediating role of service value perceived by employees as well as the role of customer orientation on the firm's performance was attempted. For this study, a total of 292 usable questionnaires were collected from hospital staffs located in metropolitan cities of Korea. The hypotheses concerning relationships among service orientation, service value, employee satisfaction and customer orientation were verified by covariance structural modelling, using SPSS 10.0 and AMOS 4.0 programs. The result is as follows. First, organisational service orientation had a positive effect on both employee satisfaction and service value perceived by hospital staff. Second, employee satisfaction had a positive impact on service value and customer orientation. Finally, service value as well as employee's customer orientation were found to exert positive influence on the medical firm's performance.     

论商业银行顾客忠诚度的提高

忠诚的顾客对商业银行的经济效益影响极大,影响顾客忠诚度的因素有转移成本、顾客满意、顾客信任以及顾客感知价值。要提高商业银行的顾客忠诚度,必须在“以客户为中心”的理念的指导下,在利用数据仓库,对顾客进行分类管理,提供个性化服务的同时,进行业务流程创新,实行内部营销。     

The impact of customer-specific marketing expenses on customer retention and customer profitability

We study the effects of customer-specific marketing expenses on customer retention and customer profitability in a business-to-business setting. Using data from a company providing hygiene services, we look at the impact of a hitherto unstudied type of expense targeted at individual customer relationships: the offering of free equipment to customers. The data allow tracking the activities performed in more than 4,500 customer relationships over a period of 4 years. Retention rates are higher for customers targeted with free equipment, but this effect results from an interaction with customer size. First-order dynamic panel data analyses show that the impact of targeted marketing expenses on customer dollar profit is positive for large customers, but there is no effect for smaller customers. Thus, targeted marketing expenses seem to be a tool for relationship maintenance rather than customer development: they help in retaining large customers that generate more profit, but they do not seem to work in developing new customers into larger, more profitable ones.     

How online service recovery approaches bolster recovery performance? A multi-level perspective

Employees are often sandwiched between understandable customer grievances and unchangeable organizational policies: only when employees feel fairly treated will they treat customers fairly. Most previous studies focused on external service recovery systems for customers, but neglected internal service recovery systems for frontline employees. By extending Homburg and Fürst’s research, this study adopts a multi-level perspective to explore the influences of the mechanistic approach (process guidelines, behaviour guidelines, and compensation guidelines) and the organic approach of service recovery (empowerment and recovery culture) on frontline employees’ responses (recovery efficacy, accountability, and performance) towards implementing a service recovery within an online auction context.     

Managing for customers and employees in Hong Kong: The quality and teamwork challenges

Service marketing, total quality management, and human resource management researchers have proposed that employee teamwork is a foundation for service quality. North American research suggests that developing cooperative relationships and constructive controversy among employees can empower employees to serve customers and to strengthen their work relationships and commitment to the organization. Chinese employees in an American-style restaurant in Hong Kong were interviewed on specific incidents that affected service quality. Correlational and structural equation results support the hypotheses that cooperative goals help employees discuss their diverse views open-mindedly and that this constructive controversy results in quality customer service. Competitive and independent goals were largely negatively correlated with dynamics and outcomes. Results were interpreted as suggesting that service teams should develop strong cooperative goals and the skills and procedures of constructive controversy. Deutsch's theory of cooperation and competition, although developed largely through North American research, seems useful for understanding and developing service quality teamwork in Asia.     

Perils of Managing the Service Profit Chain: The Role of Time Lags and Feedback Loops

The tendency of managers to focus on short-term results rather than on sustained company success is of particular importance to retail marketing managers, because marketing activities involve expenditures which may only pay off in the longer term. To address the issue of myopic management, our study shows how the complexity of the service profit chain (SPC) can cause managers to make suboptimal decisions. Hence, our paper departs from past research by recognizing that understanding the temporal interplay between operational investments, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and operating profit is essential to achieving sustained success. In particular, we intend to improve understanding of the functioning of the SPC with respect to time lags and feedback loops. Results of our large-scale longitudinal study set in a multi-outlet retail chain reveal time-lag effects between operational investments and employee satisfaction, as well as between customer satisfaction and performance. These findings, along with evidence of a negative interaction effect of employee satisfaction on the relationship between current performance and future investments, show the substantial risk of mismanaging the SPC. We identify specific situations in which the dynamic approach leads to superior marketing investment decisions, when compared to the conventional static view of the SCP. These insights provide valuable managerial guidance for effectively managing the SPC over time.     

How and why (imagined) online reviews impact frontline retail encounters

This research examines how frontline retail employees respond to customers whom they think might write an online review about their experience. Across six experiments (one field and five online) we show that when employees identify potential online review authors, often by what the customer says or does, it catalyzes them to deliver better service. This ensues because they experience a rise in determination to do well, motivated by the prospect of being associated with a positive review, which they believe will impress the retailer. Thus, they go ‘above and beyond’. However, determination is tempered by two boundary conditions. When employees (i) do not consider that being associated with an online review is beneficial (i.e., not goal relevant) or (ii) feel poorly equipped to serve the customer (i.e., low in self-efficacy), then a better service delivery will not occur. We also show that retailers can enhance customer service through internal championing of the importance of online reviews, so long as this is framed as promotional rather than punitive.     

Quality Assurance Certification for Hospitality Marketing,Sales and Customer Services

The article proposes that there is a need to extend quality assurance schemes to encompass marketing and customer services. The hospitality industry's involvement in the consideration of quality assurance schemes is discussed and the degree to which they have been accepted. An explanation of the Marketing Quality Assurance Scheme (MQA) is presented with detailed examples of the objectives to be met in assuring the quality of marketing, sales plans and customer service. The study concludes that quality assurance schemes for services and marketing are essential for the hospitality industry, in order to guarantee the quality of provision and to offer a bridge from quality assurance to the concept of Total Quality Management.     

建立以顾客为中心的运行机制

企业的成功与否取决于能否以顾客为中心 ,并取悦顾客 ;以顾客为中心不是一句口号 ,必须将“顾客满意”置于企业所有目标之上 ,以实现顾客需求和期望为企业努力方向和员工行为准则。以顾客为中心来源于顾客信息的获取 ,新的组织设计、有效的内部营销和精心设计的服务提供模式。     

The role of customer contact employees as external customers: A conceptual framework for marketing strategy and future research

Existing streams of literature in marketing, management, and organizational behavior are integrated to propose a conceptual framework that highlights the customer contact employee's dual role as employee and external customer of the organization. Several iterative “cycles of success” are proposed whereby job satisfaction, the employee's patronage of the company's products (i.e., goods or services), and job performance (as customer contact employees) are all enhanced, ultimately leading to long-term relationships (with customers and employees) and profits for the organization. The framework highlights the role of internal marketing as a tool for enhancing the competitive advantage gained by strategically considering the customer contact employee's role as external customer.