The Role of Internal Marketing on Customer Satisfaction: The Case of Ethiopian Airline Enterprise
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Date
2014-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study investigates the situation of customer-employee interaction during service encounters, and to see whether there is an acceptable relationship between IM programs of the firm which aims at enabling employees by applying marketing like tools that the firm normally used for the external market and customer satisfaction which is the outcome of customers’ evaluation of the service quality which could be the basis for their future patronage decision. Even though the growing importance of people in service sectors are supported in main literatures there are still problems where traditional approaches of managing business that dully focus on external customers’ satisfaction is still a believes of many firms. The study targets 200 samples of customers based on their convenience and easiness to determine their satisfaction from the service they received and selected 344 customer contact employees randomly to obtain their evaluation of the enterprises’ IM practice. Employees’ empathy, responsiveness, tangibility dimension, assurance and reliability of the service were found significant in affecting customers’ satisfaction. The descriptive analysis of the finding dictates that there is lack of adequate employee training, employee empowerment, and employee motivation which result to customer dissatisfaction. From the study finding, the Pearson correlation coefficient of internal marketing variables shows that there is a strong positive correlation between IM variables and customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is advisable for ET to take the necessary measures regarding employees’ commitment; revising the existing employee motivation system to reflect all employees requirement; there should be open and welcoming management to assist employees in their difficulties; internal communication should be there to keep employees up-to-date and informed about new events
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Keywords
Internal Marketing, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction